Stan Douglas: ISDN

Serralves is presenting a major new exhibition by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas (Vancouver, Canada, 1960), which marks one of the most significant moments of our programme for the first half of 2024, a year in which we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s April 25 Revolution.

Centered on the film ISDN (2022), initially conceived for the 59th Venice Biennale, the exhibition presents a vibrant dialogue between different cultures and social movements, portrayed via a fictional musical performance between rappers from London and Cairo, whose verses address key issues such as race, class, love, identity and justice. ISDN is a large-scale two-channel video installation that explores music as a form of cross-continental cultural collaboration titled after a technology, introduced in the 1980s, used to transmit high-quality digital audio over copper phone lines. The video installation has two screens facing each other. It stages a fictionalized account of two musical collectives on each screen, ca. 2011, one in London featuring Grime rappers Lady Sanity and TrueMendous, and another in Cairo featuring Mahraganat rappers Raptor and Joker, trading freestyle verses supposedly transmitted over ISDN lines. While the London rappers exchange 16-bar verses the performers in Cairo listen—until it’s their turn to do the same—or so it seems, even though they were recorded separately and weeks apart in their respective cities. The viewer is positioned between the two screens, caught in this call-and-response cipher unfolding across continents. The performers foreground systemic social ills in their verses, directly raising questions about race and class in their home countries. Layers of sound underneath the vocals are mixed in an ever-changing configuration, in permutations that take more than four weeks before they repeat.

In addition to the film, the exhibition also includes two large-format photographs inspired by crucial moments of social change in the turbulent year of 2011, which continue to reverberate today, such as the Arab Spring and the protests in London.

Learn more at Serralves.