Sascha Behrendt speaks with the revered artist about his work at the intersection of theater, photography, and technology—and his recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner in Los Angeles.
Stan Douglas is a Canadian artist working with and testing the mediums of film, photography, and installation. His recent exhibition at David Zwirner, Los Angeles, features re-created photographic images of uprisings that took place around the world in 2011. These include the Arab Spring, London riots, Occupy Wall Street, and the Stanley Cup riots. Alongside these are a two-channel video installation ISDN. The works were shown at the Canadian Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Deeply interested in past history, Douglas seeks to disrupt and open up new considerations of received narratives and news. A recipient of the 2016 Hasselblad Award and the 2019 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts, his work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, UK; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Sascha Behrendt: Congratulations on your new show. I would love to know what initially inspired you to create these works for this exhibition.
Stan Douglas: So when 2011 happened, and everything was going on around the world, it just occurred to me that it seemed to be very similar to what was happening during the revolts of 1848. I’d been kind of curious about it ever since reading Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducational Sentimentale (1869), which has that event as a pivotal scene at the end of the novel. Then, of course, Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) features the aftermath of that, which is a great piece of writing. So, with 2011, I recognized something, but then later, I had the idea to depict it using aerial footage from newscasts.