Stan Douglas: Ghostlight will be the artist’s first survey in the U.S. in over 20 years and will chart his global influence and innovation across 40 works from the 1990s to the present.
The exhibition will present the North American premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” framed by a selection of works that explore topics ranging from settler colonialism in the Americas, to the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe. Douglas’ deeply researched and longtime commitment to these histories provide an expansive view of the present, one that sheds light on moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval.
Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Many works in the exhibition—rendered in film, video, photography, and installation—investigate pivotal historical events. Through ambitious restagings of battle scenes, covert plots, riots, civic collapse, and social tension and unease, Douglas focuses on moments of rupture where “history could go one way or the other.”
Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by CCS Bard and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), which will present a separate exhibition by Douglas in 2025, along with Dancing Foxes Press. A lasting resource, the book will feature new essays by CCS Bard curator Lauren Cornell; Kevin Moore, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition; as well as scholars including Christian Ayne Crouch, Associate Professor of History and American and Indigenous Studies at Bard College; Christina Sharpe, Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto; and Laura U. Marks, Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
About Stan Douglas
In 2022, Douglas represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, where he debuted a major video installation, ISDN (2022) and a related body of photographs titled 2011 ≠ 1848 (2021). Subsequently, the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 traveled across Canada and continued in 2023 at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands. In 2023, this body of work inaugurated David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles location, and it is currently on view at the Parque de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, through January 12, 2025. The photographs will be featured in the survey at the Hessel Museum of Art.
The artist’s permanent public commission in Penn Station’s Half Century was unveiled in Moynihan Train Hall, Penn Station, New York, in 2021. This body of work, commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall, is composed of nine vignettes arranged into four thematic panels that explore the rich history of Penn Station.
Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); and the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver. Douglas (b. 1960) was born in Vancouver and studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver.
Exhibition Organization and Credits
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight is organized by CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art and curated by Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Exhibitions at CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are made possible with generous support from Lonti Ebers, the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Birth of a Nation (2025) is commissioned by the Hartwig Art Foundation with the Brick, Los Angeles.
The exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of David Zwirner, New York. Special thanks to Victoria Miro, London, for their additional support to the project.
