Stan Douglas to represent Canada in Venice 2021

Stan Douglas known for his multidisciplinary works, including films, photographs, and, more recently, theatre productions, often reflects on the dynamic potential embedded in pivotal historical moments. He lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles.

He is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles. His films and photographs have been included in exhibitions internationally since the early 1980s, including at documenta IX, X and XI (1992, 1997, 2002) and in four Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005 and 2019). For the last biennale in 2019, Douglas created a two-channel video installation Doppelgänger, which depicts colliding alternate realities and presented a selection of photographs from his 2017 “Blackout” series—partially inspired by blackouts that occurred in New York City in 1977 and 2003, the series imagines the impact of the loss of power on a monumental scale.

A survey of his work, Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, toured Europe from 2013 until the end of 2015. From 2014 until 2017 his multimedia theater production Helen Lawrence was presented in Vancouver, Toronto, Munich, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Douglas received the International Centre for Photography’s Infinity Prize in 2012, the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2013, the Hasselblad Award in 2016, and was the 2019 recipient of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Between 2004 and 2006 he was a professor at Universität der Künste Berlin and since 2009 has been a member of the core faculty in the Grad Art Department of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

La Biennale di Venezia is the largest and most prestigious contemporary art exhibition in the world with more than 80 countries participating. For more than 60 years, theCanada Pavilion, situated in the Giardini in Venice, has featured the work of the most accomplished Canadian artists, curated by the country’s most renowned curators.