Stan Douglas. Parallax

Jeu de Paume

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has been developing an ambitious body of work that questions how history is constructed, represented, and transmitted. Through complex narrative devices, he sheds light on the mechanisms by which images shape our perception of reality and reveal the social, political, and cultural tensions specific to each era. This monograph, the most important in Paris in over 30 years, highlights the scope of Stan Douglas's practice, which combines film and video, photography, installation, and theater-like devices. It presents works dating from the 1980s to today, 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 mediums 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 through which to address issues of race, class, and social inequality. In his recent video installation Birth of a Nation (2025), he extends this reflection by reinterpreting D. W. Griffith's eponymous 1915 film — a foundational work of Hollywood cinema, celebrated for its technical innovations but also condemned for its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its stereotypical representations of Black characters — deconstructing its images and narratives in order to expose the underlying prejudices. Douglas preserves the black-and-white aesthetic and the absence of sound from the original film, but deconstructs its narrative by proposing four alternative perspectives that overturn and interrogate the narratives of race, power, and violence inscribed within it. Through works rooted in specific historical contexts, Stan Douglas reminds us that history is never fixed: it is constantly being recomposed, shaped by human actions and the narratives that emerge from them.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗