Stan Douglas — Parallax — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In about 2 months: October 20, 2026 → January 10, 2027

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has developed a body of work that examines the narratives through which societies construct and transmit their histories. Working at the intersection of film, photography, video, and installation, the Canadian artist explores the role of images in shaping collective memory and in representing the political, social, and cultural tensions that define the contemporary world.

This exhibition, the most significant presentation of his work in Paris in more than three decades, brings together works produced from the 1980s to the present day. Installations, photographs, and narrative environments reflect a practice that draws as much from fiction as from documentary, and from literature as from theatre. Among the works on view are Hors champs (1992), The Secret Agent (2015), Crowds and Riots (2008), Disco Angola (2012), and Penn Station (2021).

Music, and jazz in particular, occupies a central place in Douglas’s work. For the artist, it provides a privileged lens through which to address questions of race, class, and social inequality. This line of inquiry continues in Birth of a Nation (2025), in which Douglas revisits D. W. Griffith’s controversial film. Retaining the original work’s black and white aesthetic and silent format, he dismantles its narrative through multiple alternative perspectives that expose the structures of power, violence, and prejudice embedded within it.

Rooted in specific historical contexts, Stan Douglas’s works remind us that history is never fixed. Rather, it remains a field of forces in constant transformation, shaped by the images, memories, and narratives that continually redefine its meaning.