Cultural revival | I remember, motto of Stan Douglas

First exhibition of the celebrations of the 15^and anniversary of the Phi Foundation, Narrative Unveilings features photographs by visual artist Stan Douglas, who will represent Canada at the 59^and Venice Biennale. Photos from a huge staging work carried out both in Angola and Vancouver to reconstruct pages of history.

Eric Clement
The Press

Stan Douglas is one of the most influential Canadian visual artists of the past 20 years. Fascinated by photography, he also uses video, music, literature and theater to evoke social concerns, proceeding, as you will see in Phi, with reconstructions of historical scenes.

“Stan Douglas has spent the last 30 years devoting himself to the work of exploring, making and understanding the image, and its power in particular,” says Cheryl Sim, curator of the exhibition. The artist from Vancouver – who also lives in Los Angeles – is described as an archaeologist of recent human history, an artist concerned with evoking the challenges we face.

“The research I do is a way of understanding history through the prism of cultural or social events,” he said in an interview on Zoom. The work that I produce after this research is a synthesis of these understandings, a way of revisiting the past by taking different ways of doing it. »

Quebec’s motto suits Stan Douglas well. His approach is a certain way of not forgetting while celebrating memory with a new and aesthetic look that forces reflection.

international artist

The aura of Stan Douglas goes beyond our borders. The 61-year-old artist has already exhibited his solo work at the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York.

Before going to present his new installation in the Giardini, in Venice on April 23, Stan Douglas is exhibiting two photographic corpuses at Phi, the last of which, Penn’s Station’s Half Century, was commissioned by a New York economic development agency. The original photos were inserted into the new Moynihan Train Hall, which opened a year ago near the old Penn Station.

This is a series that pays homage to this former train station, a magnificent beaux-arts style building connected to the railway network and which was built between 1905 and 1910, then controversially demolished in 1963 to accommodate two commercial towers and Madison Square Garden.

Stan Douglas’ nine photographs depict events that took place there between 1914 and 1957. Local stories chosen following documentary research. Two photos relate an anecdote that occurred in March 1914 when a snowstorm had cloistered passengers in the station.

Among them, Bert Williams, singer and actor who was the first African-American to direct a film. To make the travelers forget the stress they were enduring, he had improvised a show with other artists who were among the reclusive passengers. In the two photos, we see saxophonists, jugglers or even a puppeteer, and Bert Williams singing in the middle of the stairs.

Another photograph shows the black trade unionist Angelo Herndon climbing the station stairs in August 1934 to the applause of the crowd. Released, he had previously been arrested because “communist” books had been found in his home.

These photographs by Stan Douglas are photomontages made on a computer. He used archival photos and orchestrated his productions with 400 extras in Vancouver’s Agrodome. Like on a movie set, with professionals working in the film industry, explains Stan Douglas.

Disco Angola

The second body, Disco Angola, is a paralleling of two historical elements. First, the war of independence of the Angolans against the Portuguese colonists, from 1961 to 1975. And an incursion into the New York of the ballrooms in 1974. Cheryl Sim offers on four floors the juxtaposition of a photo resulting from a scenography made in Angola in 2012 by Stan Douglas and a photo taken the same year to recreate the disco atmosphere of Club Versailles in the 1970s. Pairs of photos to look at closely, as the details are Stan’s mark Douglas, like that of Kent Monkman.

One of the pairs combines an image of young Angolan soldiers practicing capoeira, this Brazilian martial art derived from combat techniques that were used in Angola before the beginning of slavery, and a photo of young New Yorkers – Latinos, queer, black, etc. – wiggling to the sound of disco. Two aspects of the same desire for emancipation, of the same hope for liberation. With music as a common language. Music being a particular interest for Stan Douglas, who was a DJ in his youth.

In an interview, Stan Douglas maintains the suspense about the new corpus he will unveil in Venice, where he has already exhibited works in 1990, 2001, 2005 and 2019. But never solo at the Canadian pavilion of the Biennale. “I’m very happy to be there with the extraordinarily generous support of the National Gallery of Canada,” he says.

While waiting for possible gondolas, nothing better than to go to Phi to appreciate his works which remind us that the past builds the present. As long as we remember…