Lecture: Stan Douglas

About this event

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects.

Stan Douglas will talk about his work, and more specifically about its relationship with theory. The lecture will be followed by a discussion with Eric C.H. de Bruyn (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Leiden University).


Stan Douglas is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver. Since 1990 his films, videos and photographs have been seen in exhibitions internationally, including Documentas IX, X and XI (1992, 1997, 2002) and three Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005). Solo exhibitions of his work have been have been presented by the most prominent museums in Europe and North America and a comprehensive survey, Past Imperfect: Works 1986–2007, was mounted by the Württembergischer Kunstverein and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in the fall of 2007. In 1986 he organized a touring exhibition of Samuel Beckett's media works for the Vancouver Art Gallery, Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, and in 2006 co-curated Beyond Cinema: Art of Projection for the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Between 2004 and 2006 he was a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is currently Core Faculty in the Graduate Department of the Art Center College of Design in California.

Co-organisation erg/WIELS, Certa (UCL), Argos.

30.09.2013, 19.30
EN 
Free entrance
Info & reservation (required): welcome@wiels.org

WIELS will present an exhibition of Stan Douglas in Autumn 2015.