The National Gallery of Canada, the commissioner of Canadian participation in the Venice Biennale, has unveiled the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 at two locations in the Italian city.
Douglas, who works in Vancouver and Los Angeles, presents new video and photographic work inspired by the 10th anniversary of 2011, a year that saw significant political unrest around the globe.
Gallery director Sasha Suda says the work's investigation of the languages of protest, revolt and revolution are pertinent to the current moment.
"Reflecting on events from a decade ago, and echoing narratives from a former century, 2011 ≠ 1848 resonates loudly with events of the past two years, as the global pandemic has surfaced fundamental fissures within the social fabric along lines of race, class, mobility, and access," says Suda. "A leading voice in Canada and internationally, Douglas challenges us to reflect upon how we want to live tomorrow.”
On view in the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini are four large-scale photographs that restage protests and riots from 2011 at four geographic locations. The images feature people gathered along Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on Jan. 12 at the start of the Arab Spring; the aftermath of the June 15 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver; clashes between youth and police in the London borough of Hackney on Aug. 9; and the kettling of Occupy Wall Street protesters on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1.
The works explore the events of 2011 as unconscious reactions to the economic and political status quo that followed the recession of 2008, and examine the ways in which social media fuelled movements for change.
To create his photographs, Douglas combined high-resolution photographic and computer-generated plate shots of each event's site with elaborate staged re-enactments and, in one case, documentary aerial footage. Presented as compelling and accurate records of real situations, his hybrid-documentary photographs are actually meticulous reconstructions that speak of history as inseparable from the mediated forms of its retelling.
In the Magazzini del Sale, a 16th-century salt warehouse on Dorsoduro, Douglas shifts from the representational lens of his photographs to the active mediations of the moving image in a two-channel video installation that explores music as a form of cultural resistance.
Taking its title from an obsolete method of transmitting digital audio over telephone lines, ISDN centres around two musical genres, Grime and Mahraganat. Grime music emerged in London in the mid-2000s at the same time as Mahraganat (which translates from Arabic as “festivals”) appeared in Cairo. Although Grime has its roots in Dubstep, and Mahraganat in Sha‘abi, the two genres often share a similar timbre because many producers use the same free or pirated software, as well as similar samples gleaned from the Internet. By 2011, both genres had become a soundtrack for youthful revolt.
ISDN presents a fictionalized account of Grime and Mahraganat rappers exchanging beats and lyrics, using scavenged equipment in improvised recording studios in London and Cairo. Sensorially immersive, the rhythms in ISDN move through a game of call and response that thwarts the parameters between what is seen and what is heard.
ISDN continues Douglas’ exploration of music, at the core of his work since the early 1990s, including his look at Free Jazz in Hors-champs (1992) and the Afrobeat-inflected Jazz-Funk in the marathon jam session Luanda-Kinshasa (2013).
The exhibition's title, 2011 ≠ 1848 draws a comparison between the events of 2011 and those of 1848, a year in which continent-wide upheaval found European middle and working classes allied in a fight against a lack of democratic freedoms, restrictions on the press, and the continued dominance of an aristocratic elite. Revolt in 1848 was continental, as news spread by print media, but revolt in 2011 was global, with news spread virally by way of electronic media.
Across Europe and North America, events were simply policed and ignored. In North Africa and the Middle East, they were suppressed or subverted, with a few notable exceptions. The work addresses the rise of populist nationalism and civil war in the ensuing decade linking it to the failure to address root causes.
Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848, curated by Reid Shier, is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with texts by Erika Balsom, Ma’an Abu Taleb, George E. Lewis and Samir Gandesha.
Source: National Gallery of Canada