Artist Stan Douglas, Whose Engrossing Work Imagines Alternative Histories, Will Represent Canada at the 2021 Venice Biennale

Stan Douglas, the Vancouver-based multimedia artist whose film
installations, photographs, and theater productions address
marginalized voices and the role of technology in image-making,
will represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2021.

Details about the sprawling biannual event—sometimes known as
the art-world Olympics—are beginning to trickle in about a year and
a half before kickoff. Earlier this month, New York-based curator
Cecilia Alemani was named artistic director for
the 59th edition. More countries are expected to announce their
representatives in the coming months.

Douglas was selected—unanimously—by a four-person panel of
Canadian art experts. In a statement issued by the National Gallery of
Canada, the pavilion’s commissioner, the committee said that “the
currency of Douglas’ practice is especially relevant in the context
of the Biennale’s global dialogues,” citing his “paradigmatic
investigations into the relation of local histories with
generational social forces” as a driving force behind their
decision.

“Douglas is one of the country’s most internationally respected
artists, with a practice recognized for its critical imagination,
formal ingenuity and deep commitment to social enquiry,” the jury
added.

Douglas, who is represented by David Zwirner in New York and
Victoria Miro in London, is no stranger to Venice. Although he has
never represented Canada, he has been included in four previous
editions, beginning in 1990. Most recently, his work was a
highlight of the central exhibition at last year’s Biennale, titled
“May You Live in Interesting Times.”

The two-part exhibition included his 2017 photographic series
“Blackout,” in which he depicts a New York City blackout that never
happened, and a new video installation, Doppelgänger,
that tells the story of an astronaut who is transported to a
spacecraft thanks to quantum teleportation—but gets copied along
the way, sparking uncertainty over who is the real woman.

Fittingly, the film will be shown simultaneously at Douglas’s
two galleries, David Zwirner in New York and Victoria Miro in
London, in February.

This concept of diverging narratives is one Douglas has mined
before. In his six-hour long opus Luanda-Kinshasa, shown in the
Whitney’s recent exhibition dedicated to Jason Moran, Douglas
staged a fictional recording inside a historical replica of the
famed studio where Miles Davis once worked.

In an interview with Art21 filmed in 2017, Douglas said, “I want to
go back to these possibilities of, ‘what if there’s another way of
considering history?’” His practice, he explained, is about
exploring utopias—nonexistent places one can strive for, but never
actually reach.

The artist will be visiting the National Gallery later this year
to begin planning his commission.

The post Artist Stan Douglas, Whose Engrossing Work Imagines
Alternative Histories, Will Represent Canada at the 2021 Venice
Biennale appeared first on artnet News.