Rap, resistance, and riots, as Stan Douglas’s Venice Biennale exhibition 2011 ≠ 1848 makes Canadian premiere at The Polygon Gallery
Vancouver-born artist explores global revolt through intricately restaged photos and fictionalized rap battles
Stan Douglas’s ISDN, a still from the two-channel video installation, picturing Cairo’s Joker. Still courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong
Stan Douglas’s ISDN, a still from two-channel video installation, picturing London’s Lady Sanity. Still courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong
The Polygon Gallery presents 2011 ≠ 1848 until November 6.
DECKED OUT IN CANUCKS jerseys and blue-and-green facepaint, hoisting team towels, devil horns, and “We’re Number One” sport fingers, a crowd is cheering wildly. But they’re not at a hockey game. They’re celebrating a car that’s been overturned and set ablaze in front of a Canada Post building.
The scene is instantly recognizable to anyone from Vancouver. The Stanley Cup riots of 2011.
In Vancouver-born artist Stan Douglas’s thought-provoking new 2011 ≠ 1848 exhibition at The Polygon Gallery, that image shares a room with three other, meticulously restaged photos of protest events that echoed across the globe in 2011: Occupy Wall Street, the London riots, and the Arab Spring in Tunisia.
But how could those serious images of social unrest—the Hackney riots over the shooting of Mark Duggan by London’s Metropolitan Police, cops arresting protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the prayer sit-ins for democracy along Tunis’s Avenue Habib Bourguiba—relate to a mob of face-painted assholes setting a car on fire?
“In Vancouver, these were intuitive reactions to the conditions people were living in,” Douglas suggests during a media tour of the gallery. “I’m representing four different reactions to the global conditions.”
Turning back to his wall-filling image of rioters on Georgia Street, he hints: “I’m suggesting this is a political act.”
Like his major video installation in the next room, the works show people connecting over vast distances to raise their voices—with intricate interventions by the artist that aren’t immediately obvious. The year 1848 in the title refers to a time of middle- and working-class people fighting for democratic reforms in Europe—a period largely limited to that continent. In 2011, in the wake of the 2008 recession, movements for change rippled around the world via smartphones and social media. But to what end?
Making its Canadian premiere here after last year’s buzzed-about showing at the Venice Biennale, 2011 ≠ 1848—curated by The Polygon’s Reid Shier—fills two rooms at the Polygon. Next to the photo exhibit, visitors can stand in a dark space between two videos, flanked by fiercely charismatic rappers from two scenes: on one screen we see U.K. grime artists Lady Sanity and True Mendous; on the other Cairo mahraganat rappers Joker and Raptor.
At the Biennale, the videos were installed at Magazzini del Sale, a 16th-century salt warehouse, while the photos filled the Canadian Pavilion at the Giardini. “It’s a delight to bring the work together—it feels much more intimate,” Shier says.
In the video installation, called ISDN, the two facing screens feature the rappers, in headphones, taking turns at the mike; when the London pair aren’t dropping rhymes, they’re rocking out to the raps pouring out of the Egyptian screen, and vice versa.
But as with the photos in the next room, not everything is as it seems. The call-and-response rap battle has been fictionalized—Douglas recorded the lyrics and beats separately, cutting each into 4/16 bars and rearranging them.
“There are seven bass stems, 13 melody stems, and 11 rhythm stems,” says the artist, who had to write a mind-numbing 100,000 lines of code to make it work. “It will take three-and-a-half days before the same combination of songs will repeat themselves.”
Douglas put an equal amount of work into researching rap forms and artists whose styles could mirror and intersect with each other from across continents. He purposely settled on two women in the London scene and two men from Egypt’s scene. Their lyrics—appearing with English and Arabic subtitles and as text covering the wall before you enter the exhibit—express the same ideas of cultural resistance that echo in the protest photos. In a deeper level of thematic intersection, both grime and mahraganat employ sampling from the Internet. (The genres emerged as street music in the mid-2000s.)
“They have sort of the same DNA,” Douglas says, and then adds of his extended remixing: “It’s the idea that cultural hybridity has infinite possibilities.”
ISDN becomes another electrifying example of how information and zeitgeists spread across a wired world. (It’s important to note that its title refers to a near-obsolete mode of transmitting high-quality audio over telephone lines.)
Stan Douglas, Vancouver, 15 June 2011, 2021, Chromogenic print on Dibond. Photo courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong
FROM HACKNEY TO TUNIS
The panoramic photos took an equal amount of logistical work from Douglas—who, as Shier points out, ended up having an extra year to create the huge suite of images, due to the pandemic postponing the Biennale from 2020 to 2021.
Unable to travel globally, Douglas had to find new ways to reconstruct the historical events. At first he imagined he could stage the scenes on their original sites. “But that was impossible, too expensive,” he says.
Instead, he directed photographers to shoot the locations themselves. Douglas then had to painstakingly alter the images digitally to time-travel back to 2011. For the Vancouver work, that meant rewinding to a Canada Post main office that wasn’t being redeveloped into condos.
For the Hackney photo, Douglas went to war with gentrification, returning rooftops and erasing new buildings from the overhead shot.
Douglas and Shier reveal that all but that London-riots image were elaborately staged with actors at the PNE’s Agrodome.
In the case of the Stanley Cup Riots image—an amalgamation of many separate shots—costume designers and makeup artists studied photos from that day to put together exact replicas of looks at the scene of the crime; think Free Willy jerseys, giant V’s covering faces, and blue-tinsel wigs. Douglas points out a “3” painted on someone’s cheek, a reference to the three times that the Canucks made it to the Stanley Cup—1982, 1994, and 2011. The last of those two times, their “fans” tore the streets apart.
Look at the photos and it’s crystal clear that Douglas is not trying to mimic documentary or news shots. There is something off, or perhaps something too perfect, about the constructed images. Inspect London, 9 August 2011 (Pembury Estate) closer and you’ll see that the artist has sutured together asynchronous moments of time, from the riot police arriving to a car set on fire.
“It is like an alienation effect; it's sort of this hyperreality where it’s almost too real to be true,” Douglas explains to Stir in a separate onsite interview. “There's too much detail, too much is there in parallel. To me it's more like a map of a riot than a documentation of a riot. It’s a sort of disruption.
“It was intentionally placed this way and so these events have a relationship that’s meaningful in some way,” he adds. In most photography, he suggests, the photographer is capturing a real unfolding event in real time. “With this kind of photography, it’s there because things were supposed to be put in relation.”
So what do we conclude from these video and still images “put in relation” to each other? It helps to look at Douglas’s other famous works, whether that’s his massive depiction of the Gastown Riots, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, on permanent display at SFU Woodward’s courtyard, or his multimedia 2014 play Helen Lawrence, about Vancouver’s storied Hogan’s Alley. Douglas often focuses on historical turning points—or potential turning points. In the case of some of the rallies restaged here, we see suppression.
Perhaps Reid Shier puts it best: “It’s far from certain how the activism, riots, and occupations that erupted across the globe in 2011 might become manifest in years to come. History has a way of playing out in radically unforeseen ways, and this exhibition presents a nuanced and complicated way to think about its trajectory.”
As with all of Douglas’s art, it feels like a mistake to oversimplify the meaning. The messages in his works are as complex as the intensely complicated processes behind them. And that makes The Polygon show, which next travels to the Remai Modern and National Gallery of Canada, so important right now. We may be teetering on another potential turning point in history—one in which we still seem to be grappling with the social, political, and economic forces that unleashed the unrest and chaos of 2011. In fictionalizing history, Douglas, as always, is getting closer to the messy truth.
Stan Douglas’s New York City, 10 October 2011, 2021. Chromogenic print on Dibond. Photo courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London, and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
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