Stan Douglas. Parallax

This monograph, the most significant in Paris in over 30 years, highlights the breadth of Stan Douglas’s practice, combining cinema and video, photography, installation, and theater-like settings. It presents works dating 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 mediums to develop a unique language where literature, music, documentary, and fiction intersect. Music, and jazz in particular, is present in many of his works, serving as a privileged lens through which the artist addresses issues of race, class, and social inequalities.

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 to expose their underlying prejudices.

Douglas retains the black-and-white aesthetic and the absence of sound from the original film, but deconstructs its narrative by offering 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 recomposed through human actions and the stories that emerge from them.