Stan Douglas on Q: A visual companion guide
In a Q interview, the Canadian artist explained why representing Canada at the Venice Biennale is complicated
Click the play button above to listen to Tom Power's full interview with artist Stan Douglas. Follow along with the conversation using this visual companion guide.
What if we could go back and re-examine some of history's minor moments of tension that occurred during the world's biggest cultural shifts? What would we learn about ourselves?
That's a question Vancouver artist Stan Douglas has been asking over his 40-year career. He was selected to represent Canada on the art world's biggest stage, the 59th Venice Biennale, which is where he unveiled his highly ambitious new photography and video installation, 2011 ≠ 1848.
The large-scale exhibit is inspired by the 10th anniversary of 2011, a year that saw significant social and political unrest around the globe. Douglas joined Q's Tom Power from Los Angeles to discuss the project and why representing Canada at the Venice Biennale is a bit complicated.
Follow along with their conversation using the media and images below.
Luanda-Kinshasa
Luanda-Kinshasa is a six-hour multi-channel installation of looping, edited and remixed video. It addresses the origins of jazz in Africa while reimagining a 1970s New York jam session that never actually happened. It also investigates the music Douglas feels Miles Davis might have made had he had the opportunity.
Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971
In the heart of Vancouver's Gastown district, the corner of Abbott and Cordova was the site of a 1971 peaceful pot protest turned police riot. Douglas recreated an imagined scene using more than 100 actors and reproduced building facades to produce a 16-foot panoramic photograph.
Penn Station's Half Century
Douglas's set of four large murals — combining staged photography and computer graphics — were recently installed in the Moynihan Train Hall of New York City's Penn Station. Like Abbott & Cordova, Douglas used hundreds of actors to portray real people he found by researching New York culture between 1914 and 1957.
2011 ≠ 1848
In representing Canada at the 59th International Venice Biennale, Douglas has filled the Canadian Pavilion with four large-scale photographs, each depicting reimagined scenes from four global moments of cultural shift during the year 2011.
One is of police clashing with Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, another shows disparate groups of people sitting along the streets of Tunis pre-Arab Spring, another is a depiction of the hooliganism in Vancouver when the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup, and the final image depicts clashes between youth and police in the Hackney during the 2011 London riots. The new work is a continuation of Douglas's elaborate staged re-enactments of real situations from recent history.
ISDN
In another building at the Venice Biennale, Douglas uses a two-channel video installation to explore music as a form of cultural resistance. He juxtaposes a pair of grime rappers in London, TrueMendous and LadySanity, with two Mahraganat rappers in Egypt, Raptor and Youssef Joker. Both genres emerged as street music in the mid-2000s, becoming the sounds of youth revolt in two separate parts of the world.
Klatsassin
Through a series of photographs and a high-definition video projection, Douglas reimagines the story of the murder of a Tsilhqot'in chief in B.C. The artist describes the video, which has no beginning or end, as a "dub western."
Circa 1948
Douglas created Circa 1948 as an app that presents meticulously researched and historically accurate interactive digital environments from late 1940s Vancouver in both Hogan's Alley and the former Old Hotel Vancouver.
Helen Lawrence
Douglas took on the theatre world with his interactive stage production Helen Lawrence, inspired by post-war film noir in Vancouver. The work uses theatre, visual art, live-action filming and computer-generated historical backgrounds.
Written and produced by Catherine Stockhausen.