Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848
September 9 –
November 6, 2022
On 15 June 2011, my Comparative Civilizations teacher in high school introduced our class to the work of Mark Rothko, showing us slide after slide of his alternately ominous and euphoric colour-field paintings. Convinced that I had detected precisely those “basic human emotions” Rothko sought to summon, the riot which ensued later that night in downtown Vancouver struck me, at the time, as a miserable contrast. Watching helicopter footage of hockey fans milling around torched cars, already bored by their acts of property damage, following the Canucks’ loss in the Stanley Cup final, couldn’t have been further, I felt, from Rothko’s artistic vision, with its quasi-medieval penchant for doom. Over and above whatever puerile moral judgements I then held toward the riot, the switch from postwar abstract expressionism to 21st century spectacle laid bare not so much a contradiction as a non-relation, a chasm or discontinuity between otherwise coeval phenomena.
Stan Douglas’s solo exhibition 2011 ≠ 1848 at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver—the Canadian premier of his show at the 59th Venice Biennale—is similarly concerned with the experience of historical discontinuity. At its centre, 2011 ≠ 1848 features a series of panoramic images of delicately reconstructed protests and rebellions that rippled across the world in 2011, such as the London riots, the Arab Spring and Vancouver’s own Stanley Cup riot. Meanwhile, the two-channel video installation ISDN (2022) presents a collaboration between rappers in London and Cairo as they trade beats and lyrics. Taken together, 2011 ≠ 1848 shows Douglas testing the
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