Stan Douglas's Venice Biennale exhibition 2011 ≠ 1848 to make Canadian premiere at The Polygon Gallery this fall
The show opening September 9 was inspired by the 10th anniversary of 2011, a year of unrest around the globe
Vancouver, 15 June 2011 from the series 2011 ≠ 1848, 2021. Chromogenic print on Dibond, 150 x 300 cm. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, London and Venice, and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.
THIS YEAR’S VENICE BIENNALE is coming to Vancouver—or at least a major Canadian part of it is.
The Polygon Gallery has just announced that it will present the Canadian premiere of Stan Douglas’s 2011 ≠ 1848, September 9 to November 6.
The exhibition will be the first stop in a nation-wide tour of the artist’s 59th Venice Biennale installation, curated by gallery director Reid Shier.
Showing at the giant art event in the historic Italian canal city, 2011 ≠ 1848 spreads across two venues, a first for Canada’s presentation at the Biennale Arte: the Canada Pavilion in the Giardini, and in the Magazzini del Sale No. 5, a 16th-century salt warehouse on Dorsoduro. The artworks will be shown together for the first time at The Polygon when they travel here this fall.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the global political unrest of 2011, with four large-scale photographs and a two-channel video installation depicting four different protests and riots through re-enactments: the start of the Arab Spring in Tunis, the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, the youth and police clashes in London, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York.
The two-channel video explores music as a form of cultural resistance, creating a fictionalized exchange between rappers from London’s Grime and Cairo’s Mahraganat music scenes.
The connection to 1848 is that year’s continent-wide upheaval amid European middle and working classes, who were fighting a lack of democratic freedoms, restrictions on the press, and the aristocratic elite.
Following the Vancouver run, the exhibition will travel to Saskatoon’s Remai Modern and Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada.
Based in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Douglas is one of Canada’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, working across photographs, films, and, more recently, theatre productions. One of his best-known local works is the massive Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, a photo installation that also re-enacts an act of protest—the 1971 Gastown Riot that followed a “smoke-in”—and that hangs above the SFU Woodward’s open-air atrium. Educated at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Douglas has exhibited at the Venice Biennale before, including 2019, when he debuted the two-channel video installation Doppelgänger. Amid his many awards is the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts and the Scotiabank Photography Award.
Visit thepolygon.ca for more information. Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO
Financial Group.
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