About this exhibition
Widely acclaimed artist Stan Douglas (b.1960) is known for film installations characterized by elaborate mise-en-scènes and sophisticated montages that deal with coincidence and lost utopias of the 20th Century. For his exhibition at WIELS, the six-screen video installation The Secret Agent will be premiered. Parallel to this new work, which continues his interest in post-war history and the film noir genre, his recent video Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) reveals Douglas’ long-time involvement with music and documentary pretence, seducing us with an intimate view of an interracial band laying down hypnotically rhythmic tracks in a recording studio.
In recent years, photography assumed an independent and important place in the Canadian artist’s work. The exhibition presents a selection of recent large-scale photographic pieces. Unlike his early documentary photographs, Douglas now explores historical issues such as emancipation movements, after the example of his hometown Vancouver in Crowds and Riots (2008), or cultural phenomena such as disco music in Disco Angola (2012). For Midcentury Studio (2010-11), the artist slipped into the role of a fictional documentary photographer to portray Vancouver in the years following the Second World War. Douglas chooses actors, costumes and props carefully and makes use of production practices from the film industry.
Stan Douglas has broken fresh ground with the theatre production of Helen Lawrence (2014). The actors’ performances were simultaneously filmed on stage at the Münchner Kammerspiele and integrated into a computer-generated setting. Helen Lawrence will run as a guest performance at deSingel Antwerpen concurrently with the exhibition.
Stan Douglas is a co-production between WIELS and the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa.
The exhibition is supported by David Zwirner, New York/London and Victoria Miro, London.
Curator: Dirk Snauwaert