Venice Biennale | Stan Douglas: our story in pictures

Representing Canada at the 59^and Biennial of Venice, Stan Douglas presents, until November 27, two installations which evoke social upheavals, revolts and claims. The Vancouver artist draws a parallel between the events of 2011 and those of the European revolutions of 1848. He evokes the way in which popular movements take shape and the way in which States respond to them or not.

Eric Clement
The Press

The Venice Biennale is the only international visual arts exhibition to which Canada sends official representation. This has been the case since its very first participation, in 1952, in these Olympic Games of contemporary art. But for 70 years, this is the first time that the chosen Canadian artist has shown his work in two locations in the City of the Doges. The exhibition of Stan Douglas takes place on the one hand within the Canadian pavilion, in the green park of Giardini, on the other hand in the rooms of Magazzini del Sale n° 5, old warehouse of salt of the Dorsoduro district.

Stan Douglas opted for two locations because the brightness of the Canadian pavilion posed a problem with the projection of his video ISDN – on two screens – which he wanted in total darkness. This installation and its photographic prints exhibited in the pavilion are part of the corpus 2011 ≠ 1848curated by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) to Reid Sheir, director of the Polygon gallery in Vancouver, and fine connoisseur of the work of Stan Douglas.

This work was specifically created for the Biennale, which was supposed to take place in 2021, but was pushed back by the pandemic. Stan Douglas had chosen to mark the 10^and anniversary of four social events that occurred in 2011 as a result of the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. His photographic prints are reconstructions (created in Vancouver’s Agrodome) of an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York, a gathering of protesters in Tunis, the riot that took place in Vancouver after the defeat Canucks in the Stanley Cup final and clashes between youths and police in the London borough of Hackney.

His large “photographs” are a combination, on the computer, of shots taken at the scene of the events and the stagings he produced in the Agrodome with extras. The object of this work – quite costly – is to compare the popular movements of 2011 to the insurrections of 1848 in Europe during which part of the population wanted more democracy and the end of autocratic regimes. This “Spring of the Peoples”, which had begun in Italy in January 1848, had marked and lasting repercussions for certain countries.

Stan Douglas points out that in 2011, the grievances of the Arab Spring like those of young Britons and New Yorkers cannot be said to have been heard. “Unlike 1848, the authorities paid little or no heed to the protests,” he says, noting that then came Brexit and the Black Lives Matter movement. Not to mention the exasperation of Canadian Aboriginals and the revolt of African migrants. And the internet, he suggests, has failed to unite such protests globally, not least because social media has become places of entertainment and venting of resentment, rather than spaces of solidarity and the promotion of reforms.

In the Magazzini building, the two videos ofISDN, shot one in London and the other in Cairo, reveal these lingering frustrations. Two black British rappers and two Egyptian rappers seem to unite in the same anger thanks to the music. Some sing their rage at the discrimination suffered by blacks in Great Britain. The others express in the most poetic and less direct way possible their irritation with the authoritarian regime in place in Egypt.

For the photo pane as for the video pane, 2011 ≠ 1848 raises awareness of the risks countries take in leaving social issues unresolved. And the international impacts of inaction in politics. This is the fifth time that Stan Douglas has taken part in the Venice Biennale. The first time alone. As we can also see with his exhibition Narrative Unveilingspresented until May 22 at the Phi Foundation, his polished, attractive, spectacular images have this depth that makes the richness of art.

“Through his profound reflections on an imagined past and the present it might have spawned, Stan Douglas has been inviting us for decades to better understand and critically examine our realities,” says Simon Brault, Director and Chief management of the Canada Council for the Arts, partner of the exhibition.