Stan Douglas

David Zwirner is pleased to announce the West Coast debut of Stan Douglas’s major two-channel video installation ISDN (2022), along with a group of related photographs, which together inaugurate the gallery’s 612 North Western Avenue location in Los Angeles.

This is Douglas’s first solo presentation in more than twenty years in Los Angeles, where he lives (in addition to Vancouver) and serves as the Chair of the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Douglas was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner. He had his first American solo exhibition at the gallery in 1993—the second show after David Zwirner opened its doors in New York’s SoHo neighborhood earlier that year—and this will be his sixteenth exhibition at the gallery overall.

Image: Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Location

612 North Western Avenue Los Angeles CA, 90004

Dates

May 23—July 29, 2023

Opening Reception

Tuesday, May 23, 6—8pm

Gallery Hours

Tues—Sat 10am–6pm

Artist

Stan Douglas

Press Release

Stan Douglas

Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs—and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums.

This exhibition expands upon Douglas’s presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which has been traveling to various institutions around Canada, including The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (Fall 2022); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (February–April 2023); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (September 2023–August 2024).

Installation view, Stan Douglas: 2011≠1848, Canada Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2022, Venice. Photo by Jack Hems

Highlighted in the exhibition is the two-channel video installation, ISDN, in which the viewer finds themself in the middle of a call-and-response jam session that unfolds across continents, literally positioned between the two screens. Set in 2011, the work pairs MCs in improvised studios, one in London and the other in Cairo, who trade freestyle verses, transmitted on ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network) lines.

Stan Douglas

ISDN, 2022

Two-channel video installation

Overall dimensions variable

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“Stan Douglas’s work with music advances a mobility toward and resistance to master narratives of genre that musical discourses themselves are only recently beginning to explore, under pressure from a strongly creolizing and decolonizing impulse among … actors within the musical network who are impatient with musical genre’s unhealthy rigidities and its collusions with outmoded models of race and identity.”

—George E. Lewis, composer, performer, and scholar of experimental music

In placing rappers in these two cities in dialogue, Douglas juxtaposes two musical styles that emerged nearly simultaneously in the early 2000s—UK grime and mahraganat in Egypt. While these genres do share sonic resemblances, both emerging from hip-hop and making use of a range of nontraditional sampled effects, it is primarily their status as forms of social critique that began on the margins and eventually gained wider attention that inspired Douglas to bring them together.

While the London rappers, TrueMendous and Lady Sanity, drop their verses in English, Yousef Joker and Raptor in Cairo respond in Arabic, their performances subtitled in the opposite language. Both pairs foreground systemic social ills in their verses, directly raising questions of race and class that pertain to their own particular situations.

Stan Douglas on set in Cairo, 2021. Photo by Seham

Stan Douglas on set in London, 2021. Photo by Seham

Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

The exhibition additionally features five photographs that recreate pivotal moments during global protests from 2011: Occupy Wall Street, the London riots, the Arab Spring, and the Stanley Cup riots. To create these panoramic mise-en-scènes, Douglas digitally stitched together imagery from a variety of sources, reconstructing the historical events as accurately as possible.

Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Stan Douglas

New York City, 1 October 2011, 2021

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

59 1/8 x 118 1/8 inches (150.2 x 300 cm)
Framed: 61 3/4 x 120 3/4 inches (156.8 x 306.7 cm)

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Actors on set at the PNE Agrodome, Vancouver, 2021. Photo by Evaan Kheraj

“Almost all of the works, especially the ones that look at specifically historical events, address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live in the residue of such moments, and for better or worse their potential is not yet spent.”

—Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas

Vancouver, 15 June 2011, 2021

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

59 1/8 x 118 1/8 inches (150.2 x 300 cm)
Framed: 61 3/4 x 120 3/4 inches (156.8 x 306.7 cm)

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Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Unable to travel to these cities himself because of the global pandemic, Douglas directed photographers to capture a wide variety of location shots—from which he painstakingly removed any trace of anachronistic elements that would not have existed in 2011—and then restaged the scenes locally, with dozens of actors in period dress. In post production he inserted them into the images.

Stan Douglas

London, 2011-08-09 (Mare Street), 2017

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

70 3/4 x 118 inches (179.7 x 299.7 cm)
Framed: 73 3/8 x 120 3/4 inches (186.4 x 306.7 cm)

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Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

“Douglas’s work poses the question about whether a future can be built out of historical detritus of the bourgeois world that now lies strewn about it amidst what could be termed its comorbidities, that the COVID-19 pandemic has so dramatically and murderously exposed.”

—Samir Gandesha, professor

Stan Douglas

Tunis, 23 January 2011, 2021

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

59 1/8 x 118 1/8 inches (150.2 x 300 cm)
Framed: 61 3/4 x 120 3/4 inches (156.8 x 306.7 cm)

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The exhibition places the events of 2011 within the long sweep of history. In 1848, Europe was consumed by continent-wide upheaval that found the middle and working classes allied in a fight for democratic freedoms and against restrictions on the press and the continued domination of the aristocracy.

Revolt in 1848 was continental, but revolt in 2011 was global, with news spread virally through electronic media. The works on view explore the events of 2011 as unconscious reactions to the economic and political conditions that followed the recession of 2008 and examine the ways in which social media fueled movements for change.

Actors on set at the PNE Agrodome, Vancouver, 2021. Photo by Evaan Kheraj

Stan Douglas

London, 9 August 2011 (Pembury Estate), 2017

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

59 x 118 1/8 inches (150 x 300 cm)
Framed: 61 5/8 x 121 inches (156.5 x 307.3 cm)

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“The idea I come back to again and again is the habits of a culture or a people being disrupted by something and somehow having to deal with that. Do they deal with it by going back to the old ways, or do they deal with it by finding the new possibilities in this new situation? That’s the key thing in almost every project.”

—Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas on set in Vancouver, 2021. Photo by Evaan Kheraj

Inquire about works by Stan Douglas

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