LONDON.- The Cosmic House is presenting a site-specific installation of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, a new moving-image work by acclaimed British artist Isaac Julien, on view in the gallery space from 22 April to 18 December 2026.
All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is a visually poetic exploration of transformation as a defining condition of existence. Created by Julien in close collaboration with his long-term partner Mark Nash, the film traces change across ecological, temporal, and cultural realms, emphasising relationality and continuity over linear progression. The Cosmic House appears alongside California’s redwood forests, a glass house in the Cotswolds, and the frescoed interiors of Palazzo Te—distinct environments that actively shape experience, perception, and the flow of time. Originally conceived as a ten-screen installation for the 500th anniversary of Palazzo Te in Mantua, the site-specific presentation made for The Cosmic House reimagines the original installation through Julien’s encounter with the house, responding to its architecture and ideas. This new iteration foregrounds duration and cyclical return, echoing Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick’s vision of The Cosmic House as an architectural model of the universe with layered, non-linear time.
Drawing on feminist science fiction and critical theory, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis references Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison, and Donna Haraway. Haraway’s voice opens the work with a passage from Staying with the Trouble, establishing an ethical framework grounded in coexistence, interdependence, and care. The film follows two protagonists, Lilith and Naomi, played by Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie, as they move through landscapes and architectures. Shaped by observation, recurrence, and encounter, the elliptical narrative situates individual experience within broader cosmologies and ecologies, with human presence appearing in relation to non-human life, planetary processes, and built environments.
The gallery at The Cosmic House features an inscription by Charles Jencks that reflects on the Sun as both a mythological and scientific symbol of energy, life, death, and change. Drawing on this text, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis brings moving image, architecture, and ideas about the universe into conversation. The film moves across time and space alongside its two protagonists, whose viewpoint reaches beyond the human, while remaining rooted in care and connection across species and generations. It presents a way of understanding creation, growth, change, and destruction as deeply linked rather than opposed, suggesting a more attentive and ethical way of living in a challenging present.
