Stan Douglas, Two Friends, 1975, 2012. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives
Feb 19 – May 22 2022
PHI Foundation
Montréal, Québec

For over thirty years, Stan Douglas has devoted his work to the investigation of the image; the technologies of their making, their aesthetic languages and their dynamics of power. Through photo, film and video installation, television, theatre, mobile applications and many other digital media technologies, he delves into the recreation of moments in history at a cultural, social and political tipping point, to reveal multiple and divergent narratives in meticulous detail.

The exhibition at the PHI Foundation will present the Canadian premiere of Douglas’s most recent photo series Penn Station’s Half Century (2021) and Disco Angola (2012), a series of photos that will be presented in Québec for the first time.

Penn Station’s Half Century was commissioned by the Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund, on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall. Douglas worked with a researcher who rifled through thousands of newspapers and periodicals to select nine historic moments that took place in New York’s original Pennsylvania Station between 1914 and 1957, before it was demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden. Among these selected events is March 1, 1914, when a large number of vaudeville performers staged an impromptu show after being stranded at the station by a severe snowstorm. Another was August 7, 1934, when liberated Black labour organizer Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested for the possession of Communist literature arrived at the station to the greeting of thousands of well-wishers.

Curated by Cheryl Sim.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • Mat Collishaw: Alluvion
    Jun 6 – Oct 15, 2023
    M77 Gallery
    Milan, Italy

    Alluvion, an exhibition of the works of British artist and intellectual Mat Collishaw, curated by Danilo Eccher, will be open to the public at M77 Gallery, Via Mecenate 77, from June 7 to October 15, 2023. Alluvion represents a new landscape modelled by material deposited by floodwaters, just as digital media floods our daily life and changes the social co-ordinates through which we manage communication, making us dependent on a world increasingly mechanised and controlled by technology, an image we find in most of Collishaw’s work. (more…)