Stan Douglas. Parallax

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has developed an ambitious body of work that questions how history is constructed, represented, and transmitted. Through complex narrative devices, he highlights the mechanisms by which images shape our perception of reality and reveal the social, political, and cultural tensions specific to each era.

This monographic exhibition, the most significant in Paris for over 30 years, highlights the breadth of Stan Douglas's practice, which combines cinema and video, photography, installation, and theatre-like devices.

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 elaborate a unique language, where literature, music, documentary, and fiction intersect.

Music, and more particularly jazz, is present in many of his works and constitutes, for the artist, a privileged prism through which to address 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 the underlying prejudices.

Douglas retains the black and white aesthetic and the absence of sound of 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 rooted in precise historical contexts, Stan Douglas reminds us that history is never static: it constantly recomposes itself, according to human actions and the narratives that emerge from them.