Stan Douglas: 1848 ≠ 2011 opens at Remai Modern

1848 ≠ 2011 is inspired by historical events that caused social and political upheaval. Douglas connects sites of social rupture, portraying historic episodes of protest, riot, and occupation from 2011 in minute detail and with technical inventiveness, evoking upheavals that rocked Europe in 1848.

The exhibition includes four large-scale panoramic photographs depicting various protests and riots from 2011: the start of the Arab Spring in Tunis on January 12 with sit-ins and protests along Avenue Habib Bourguiba; the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver on June 15; clashes between youth and police in London on August 9; and the arrest of Occupy Wall Street protestors on New York’s Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Douglas developed the photographs by fusing careful and detailed re-enactments of the events with high-resolution plate shots of each city site and overhead documentary footage.

The two-channel video installation ISDN, co-owned by the NGC and Remai Modern, is included in the exhibition. It joins Douglas’s other piece in the collection, The Secret Agent (2015), which was bought in 2017 and included in Remai Modern’s debut exhibition Field Guide.

ISDN is an immersive installation that represents a fabricated cooperation between rappers from the Grime and Mahraganat music scenes in London and Cairo. ISDN, named after a now-defunct method of transferring high-quality audio via telephone lines, imagines rappers from both cities exchanging rhythms and lyrics in improvised studios, working across space and time to produce music cooperatively.

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Douglas will do an artist discussion at Remai Modern on Friday, February 3rd. The Live Mixtape, a live music and public interaction program that analyzes the latent political dimension of regional music and the ways hip hop music shapes subjectivity, fosters community, and forges solidarity across geographical and cultural boundaries, will be presented by the museum in April. A group of experienced and new prairie hip hop artists will reflect on the emergence of a vibrant music culture that addresses the specificities and complexity of place, inherited histories, and Black experience on the prairies through collaboration, talk, and performances.

Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 is curated by Reid Shier, Director of The Polygon Gallery, and is presented as a partnership between the National Gallery of Canada, Remai Modern and The Polygon Gallery.

Following its presentation at Remai Modern, this exhibition will travel to the National Gallery, opening on September 8.