Across his practice, Douglas repeatedly questions the assumed epistemological neutrality of mass media
History and fiction, past and future, reality and mental image bear little distinction for Stan Douglas, whose multimedia practice toys with the afterlives of archives and the ways through which the archive is dramatised and marshalled towards the political. A selection of 32 photographs and video installations, arranged thematically across the galleries in Douglas’s sprawling survey Ghostlight, makes a credible claim for the interchangeability of aesthetics and politics, and reveals the history of how photography, cinema and popular music disseminated across the African diaspora is bound up with unfinished projects of decolonisation, independence movements and liberation movements.
In the titular work, a panoramic photograph, a lamp stands on a stage in the storied but defunct Los Angeles Theatre. The haunted affect is more pronounced when one considers the popular saying, possibly carried over from the phantasmagorias of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that ‘every theatre has its ghost’ – a spirit that sometimes predates the history of said theatre, and needs to be appeased with a burning light. As with most of Douglas’s largescale photographs, there is a sense of grandeur in Ghostlight (2024) linking it to the spectacle of earlier manufactured images such as those produced via a magic lantern. But Ghostlight is not just about the physical appearance of the theatre, whose domineering architecture manufactures consent by eliciting audiences’ desire for identification and seduction. The photograph can equally be read as an allegory for the theatre of operation that is history, whose subjects participate in – or, rather, perform – politics by way of fabulations, tropes and hyperbole. A certain kind of historical melancholia, evoked by the empty theatre’s association with a bygone prewar mass culture, can be felt here.
122 × 305 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
Similarly, a photographic series titled 2011 ≠ 1848 (2017–21) conjures agitated bodies in political assembly – and the realisation that ideals can deteriorate over time. Employing in-studio reenactment and documentary techniques, 2011 ≠ 1848 revisits popular uprisings across the world in 2011. Citing the fraught historiography over the revolutions of 1848 – intense debates concerning these revolutions’ failure to produce structural change and their co-option by bourgeois nationalists – these photographs recreate scenes of protest, contention and ruin, capturing eruptions of revolutionary desire moments before their dispersal. In New York City, 1 October 2011 (2021), Occupy Wall Street protesters cross the Brooklyn Bridge towards an imminent mass arrest. In Vancouver, 15 June 2011 (2021), a crowd of sports fans cheers on the immolation of an overturned pickup truck. While the series title suggests that every era deserves its own historical paradigm, the photographs themselves point to the porous boundary between recent past and distant past, both of which are constantly reinterpreted in relation to each other and against demands of the present.
Elsewhere, Douglas repeatedly questions the assumed epistemological neutrality of mass media, arguing instead that cultural production can be simultaneously a mechanism for violence and a counterstrategy against empires. Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), a fictive 1970s jazz-funk recording session in New York City, alludes to the entanglements between leftwing practitioners of disco and free jazz and the postwar revival of Pan-Africanism, entanglements that sit uncomfortably beside US proxy wars in newly independent African states. Douglas’s multichannel video projection Birth of a Nation (2025), playing alongside D.W. Griffith’s eponymous 1915 film, includes four contemporary reenactments of the latter’s infamous lynching sequence and the ludicrous events preceding it. Douglas’s remakes show Griffith’s white characters caught in bewildering misrecognition – of the racialised subject’s place in their system of value, of the permissibility of violence and of their own envy and entitlement – transforming a racist plotline into a study of racist hallucinations. As they zigzag along failed modernisms and universalisms, Douglas’s projections insinuate that as much as image-makers – artists, ideologists – wish to define the terms and conditions of history, the image’s ambivalence ensures that history will nonetheless run its course.
Ghostlight at CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, through 30 November
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
