Stan Douglas response to ‘The Birth of a Nation’

Stan Douglas will be the subject of a major survey organized by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art, marking the first U.S. survey of his practice in over 20 years. On view June 21 to November 30, 2025, “Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” will be the world premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” framed by a selection of nearly 40 works from the 1990s to the present that explore topics ranging from settler colonialism in the Americas, to the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe.

Douglas’ deeply researched and longtime commitment to these histories provide an expansive view of the present, one that sheds light on moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval. 

“Across moving image, photography, and theater, Douglas’ work recalls histories that haunt: unresolved, turbulent moments, turning points, and plots that retain a hold, however imperceptible, on the present,” Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, said. “This survey seeks to show his indelible influence on global contemporary art and also how his work offers one of the most lucid and vital ways to understand our present—a time when societies around the world are at an inflection point.”  

Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Many works in the exhibition—rendered in film, video, photography, and installation—investigate pivotal historical events. Through ambitious restagings of battle scenes, covert plots, riots, civic collapse, and social tension and unease, Douglas focuses on moments of rupture where “history could go one way or the other.”

Global in scope, Douglas’ projects also provide a longer timeline and broader context for the movements for justice in our present, such as Black Lives Matter, the Standing Rock protests, and decolonial struggles around the world. 

Premiering in North America at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art as a centerpiece of the exhibition will be a new work that critically re-envisions D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” as an immersive, five-channel video installation focusing on one of the film’s most pivotal scenes. In Griffith’s controversial film, Flora, a young white woman, goes to the forest to fetch water and is followed by Gus, a Black Union veteran played by a white actor in blackface who proposes to her. After Flora rebuffs his advances, Gus chases after Flora, who jumps off a cliff. Flora’s brother Ben finds Flora near death and wipes the blood from her mouth with a Confederate flag. In retaliation, Ben leads a party of costumed Ku Klux Klan members to lynch Gus.

In Douglas’ work, one channel of the installation will show the original film sequence, while the other four imagine the scene from different characters’ perspectives. Disrupting the point of view privileged in the film, Douglas’ version reframes the lynching not as an act of heroism, but a violent act of terrorism aimed at maintaining white supremacy and racial social control.

Douglas’ reinterpretation of this landmark film is presented alongside early and recent works that serve to destabilize the narratives that inform how history is remembered. Highlights include:  

•             “Ghostlight” (2024), a recent large-scale photograph depicting the vacant Los Angeles Theater illuminated by a single floor lamp, also referred to as a ‘ghostlight,’ which allows stage workers to navigate after hours and is the source of superstitions around the ghosts that haunt such spaces;

•             Photographs from Douglas’ 2017 “Scenes from the Blackout” series, an extension of Douglas’ fictional storytelling, in which he envisions an emergency power outage across New York City, evoking real past and future events such as the 1988 blackout and Hurricane Sandy;

•             Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), a filmic recreation of the renowned Columbia 30th Street Studio in Manhattan, featuring a fictitious band recording in the early 1970s, when African and other foreign musical styles were merging to create a new sound;

•             Photographs from Douglas’ 2010 “Midcentury Studio” series, which blurs the line between what is real and what is fabricated by juxtaposing photographs from that era with images Douglas captured through painstakingly recreating a photography studio replete with authentic equipment and actors dressed to the time period; 

•             The 1996 film Nu•tka•, for which Douglas captures the landscape of Vancouver Island, the site of English and Spanish fleet battles for trade routes during the colonial period, blended together against a soundtrack featuring excerpts of paranoid sea captains’ diary entries offering competing and irreconcilable ambitions; 

•             Der Sandmann (1995), a 16mm multichannel film that considers the relationship between memory, place, and history through the lens of post-Cold War Germany; and

•             Hors-champs (1992), a live recording of four American musicians with ties to France’s “free jazz” movement of the 1960s and ’70s that speaks to the long-standing influence of African Americans abroad.

About Stan Douglas 

In 2022, Douglas represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, where he debuted a major video installation, ISDN (2022) and a related body of photographs titled 2011 = 1848 (2021). Subsequently, the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 traveled across Canada and continued in 2023 at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands. In 2023, this body of work inaugurated David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles location, and it is currently on view at the Parque de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, through January 12, 2025. The photographs will be featured in the survey at the Hessel Museum of Art.

The artist’s permanent public commission in Penn Station’s Half Century was unveiled in Moynihan Train Hall, Penn Station, New York, in 2021. This body of work, commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall, is composed of nine vignettes arranged into four thematic panels that explore the rich history of Penn Station.

About the Hessel Museum of Art  

CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art advances experimentation and innovation in contemporary art through its dynamic exhibitions and programs. Located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the Hessel organizes and presents group exhibitions and thematic surveys, monographic presentations, traveling exhibitions, as well as student-curated shows that are free and open to the public. The museum’s program draws inspiration from its unparalleled collection of contemporary art, which features the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core and comprises more than 4,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s through the present day.   

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College  

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading institution dedicated to curatorial studies, a field exploring the conditions that inform contemporary exhibition-making and artistic practice. Through its Graduate Program, Library and Archives, and the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary practices, advances new and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art, and cultivates a student body from diverse backgrounds in a broad effort to transform the curatorial field.