ARTIST ROOMS to Bring Isaac Julien’s ‘Lessons of the Hour’ to Perth

Perth Museum will present Isaac Julien’s film-based artwork ‘Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass’ (2019) from 9 October 2026 until 11 April 2027, as the first and only Scottish venue on the inaugural UK tour of ARTIST ROOMS, the touring collection of modern and contemporary art shared by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The museum announced the exhibition on 23 August 2026, timing the news to UNESCO’s International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.

The presentation centres on the 2019 work by Turner Prize-nominated British artist Isaac Julien CBE RA, a poetic meditation on the life and times of Frederick Douglass, the orator, writer and self-liberated abolitionist who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. Julien’s work, and the exhibition with it, takes its title from Douglass’s final delivered speech, given in 1894. Perth Museum says this will be the first opportunity for audiences around the UK to see the work since it was acquired for the national collection.

During his 1846 campaign against US chattel slavery and related injustices across the UK and Ireland, Douglass delivered four speeches in Perth in the former City Hall building, on the site where Perth Museum now stands. Alongside the film installation, the exhibition investigates Perthshire’s links to the transatlantic slave trade and how they continue to shape the region.

Julien said he wished to use “the distinctive language of filmmaking and photography” to draw audiences into Douglass’s words and the aesthetics of his writings, adding that, as Douglass wrote, aesthetics and politics have “a fundamental role to play in the reconstitution of our humanity.” Ashleigh Hibbins, Head of Audiences and Learning at Culture Perth & Kinross, said no location could be more fitting than a museum standing on the spot where Douglass spoke, while Gregor Muir, Director of Collection at Tate, and Anne Lyden, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland, framed the tour as part of ARTIST ROOMS’ remit to bring national-collection works to towns and cities across the UK.

The tour continues next year to other cities where Douglass spoke repeatedly during his nineteen-month campaign around the UK and Ireland, with presentations at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and Arnolfini in Bristol. Perth Museum, managed by the charitable trust Culture Perth and Kinross, is open seven days a week, and admission is free, with donations welcomed. The museum has welcomed more than 500,000 visitors since it opened and was the only Scottish finalist for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2025.