A Politics of Intuition: Stan Douglas Reimagines an Era of Revolt at the 59^th Venice Biennale 

There is perhaps no other artist for whom a year-long delay in presenting their work at the Venice Biennale feels as though it was engineered by design, rather than by chance. Throughout his thirty-five-year practice as a filmmaker, photographer, and multimedia artist, Stan Douglas has consistently surfaced the belated meaning of historical events, finding engaging, narratively complex ways to show us how the past continues to reverberate in the present. Building image archives for events that should have registered on camera but didn’t—from failed modernist utopias and civic uprisings to the everyday labours of jazz musicians and union organizers—Douglas has made a career of reimagining past moments that, in hindsight, were historical linchpins: times when things could have gone one way, but instead went another. 

Now, a year later than planned, following the disruptions of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Douglas is unveiling a new suite of works, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, as his contribution to the Canadian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, using photography, film, and sound to invent an archive of civic refusal. For 2011 ≠ 1848 (2021–22), on view at the national pavilion in the Giardini, Douglas has created photographic documentation for contemporary moments of riot and resistance that transpose them to the register of major historic events. Across four panoramic staged photographs depicting protests that emerged around the world in 2011—from the highly politicized Arab Spring movement and riots in London responding to austerity measures and police violence in the UK, to the less spectacular events of Occupy Wall Street in New York City and a hockey riot in Vancouver, his hometown—Douglas probes the unrealized potential of these grassroots actions, in which activists’ demands for transformation were largely unsuccessful. Not only were the events of 2011 communicated to, and copied by, geographically distant groups thanks to the internet but, as the title of the series suggests, 2011 also mirrored the many smaller, bourgeois revolutions that took place across Europe in 1848, with their varying demands—for voting rights, freedom of the press, and an end to wealth disparity—that went largely unmet. Although it is tempting to see the 2011 protests as the return of the unfinished past, implicit in Douglas’s juxtaposition of these two histories is a question of which stories of resistance, and which actors, get taken up as global history, and which ones register only in the quiet tones of local collective dissatisfaction.