This monograph, the most important in Paris in more than 30 years, highlights the scope of Stan Douglas's practice, which combines film and video, photography, installation and devices close to theatre. It presents works dating from the 1980s to today, 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 media to develop a singular 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 for addressing questions of race, class and social inequality.
In his recent video installation Birth of a Nation (2025), he extends this reflection by reinterpreting the eponymous 1915 film by D. W. Griffith — a founding 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 —, by deconstructing its images and narratives in order to expose the underlying prejudices.
Douglas retains the aesthetics of black and white and the absence of sound of the original film, but deconstructs its narration by proposing four alternative perspectives that overturn and question the narratives of race, power and violence inscribed within it. Through works anchored in precise historical contexts, Stan Douglas reminds us that history is never fixed: it is constantly recomposed, according to human actions and the narratives that emerge from them.