The prestigious Royal Academy's Charles Wollaston Award, one of the most significant art prizes in the country, has been won by Isaac Julien's film Western Union: Small Boats, produced by long-term collaborator director Graham Clayton-Chance.

This five-screen projection brings together baroque pageantry, metaphor, and ellipsis in a work that experiments with notions of cultural entanglement and the dissent between aesthetics and politics. The concluding instalment of Julien's trilogy of film installations dealing with voyaging and cultural displacement on both a local and global scale, Western Union: Small Boats refers to journeys made across the Mediterranean, from Africa to Europe, by Asians and Africans trying to enter Europe by sea without papers.

The film will be screening at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition until August 18th.