Stan Douglas. Parallax

This monograph, the most significant in Paris for over 30 years, highlights the breadth of Stan Douglas's practice, which combines film and video, photography, installation, and devices similar to theater. It presents works from the 1980s to the present day, notably his installations (Hors-champs, 1992; The Secret Agent, 2015...) and his photographic series (Crowds and Riots, 2008; Disco Angola, 2012; Penn Station, 2021...). Douglas exploits the codes of these different media to develop a singular language, where literature, music, documentary, and fiction intersect. Music, and jazz in particular, is present in many of his works and constitutes, for the artist, a privileged prism for addressing issues of race, class, and social inequality.

In his recent video installation Birth of a Nation (2025), he extends this reflection by reinterpreting the eponymous 1915 film by D. W. Griffith—a foundational work of Hollywood cinema, celebrated for its technical innovations but also condemned for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its stereotyped portrayals of Black characters—by deconstructing its images and narratives to expose the underlying prejudices.

Douglas retains the black and white aesthetic and the absence of sound of the original film, but deconstructs its narrative by proposing four alternative perspectives that overturn and question the narratives of race, power, and violence inscribed within it. Through works anchored in specific historical contexts, Stan Douglas reminds us that history is never static: it is constantly being recomposed by human actions and the narratives that emerge from them.