It does seem a bit incongruous at first. Why are two London grime artists - not to mention two Egyptian rappers - appearing in a work by a 62 year-old Canadian artist at the Venice Biennale? Douglas’s much-admired new two-part installation at the festival (he’s representing Canada) is a continuation of interests that the artist has been pursuing the whole of his career. 2011 ≠ 1848, as it is titled, is a richly layered collection of works, stuffed with ideas in that dizzying way contemporary art so often is, but inspired by the 10th anniversary of the seemingly unrelated but near-simultaneous protests and unrest that broke out across the globe in 2011, including the riots in London, and the music that began to emerge there around that time.
The first part of his show, in the Canadian pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, comprises four large-scale photographs which restage protests and riots from that year from four different locations - Tunis, in January at the beginning of the Arab Spring, the aftermath of the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver in June, clashes between young people and police in Hackney in the August, and the kettling of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in October. In the second, two huge screens hanging in one of the vast salt warehouses down in the Dorsoduro area of the city, right on the water, depict what seems to be a call-and-response between two duos: the London-based rappers TrueMendous and Lady Sanity (both of whom originally hail from Birmingham) and two male MCs in Cairo, El Joker and Raptor. Protest, and music as a form of cultural protest or expression of political and social frustration has long been an area of fascination for Douglas - and that particular type of expression, he tells me, “is manifest in grime, to a large degree”. Grime began to appear, he says, just before the events of 2011, which he believes were a manifestation of a “widespread intuition of something being wrong”.