Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Badawi.

My guest is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, yet he is little known in his native Britain,

and is only belatedly to use his word being given recognition here in the UK.

Well, now there is a major exhibition at the prestigious Tate Britain Museum of the work of the British Caribbean artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julian.

It is a sweeping showcase of his four-decade career. His subject matter explores some of the most divisive issues of our age, migration, racism and sexuality. As a prominent gay black man,

how far does Isaac Julian use his art to advance such causes? Sir Isaac Julian, welcome to hard

talk. Thank you, ma'am. How would you describe your artistic work because it embodies a whole range of visual arts,

photographs, drawings, art installations, experimental videos and documentaries? It sounds pretty eclectic.

Well I guess you could say I'm someone who started making films and I was very drawn to filmmaking at

early age but then I went to

art school and going to art school you're exposed to so many different sort of forms I became so

excited really as an art student that I wanted to encapsulate all those forms so in a way film

moving image photography sculpture all of those things are part of what I make.

And so I guess installation films or film installation or moving image art is the kind of, in a way, form that I chose to present my work.

Right. So you say you studied at college and in fact you won a place at the very prestigious St Martin School of Art in London, which was really pretty good at that time because you were the son of immigrants from the Caribbean island of St Lucia.

You grew up in a pretty tough inner city housing estate. So did you always know you wanted to be an artist?

Well, in a way way I think one of the

things that happens when you're kind of a bored teenager like I was and then you kind of look

across the road and see these rather you know odd artistic looking people you wonder what are they up

to once I sort of crept across that street and went to an artist studio,

it was game over. I knew that I wanted to become an artist.

Your exhibition at the Tate, it's a retrospective of your 40-year-long career. You've got

...