STAN DOUGLAS – DOPPELGÄNGER
2020-01-09Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs – and more recently theatre productions and other multidisciplinary projects – that investigate the parameters of their medium. 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.
Doppelgänger is set in an alternative present. Displayed on two square-format, translucent screens, each of which can be viewed from both sides, the looped narrative unfolds in side-by-side vignettes that depict events on worlds that are light years apart. When one spacecraft embarks on its journey, another is launched at the same time in a parallel reality. Alice, a solitary astronaut, is teleported to a distant planet, and so is her double. Then, Alice and her ship, the Hermes II, for unknown reasons, return. Alice assumes her mission has failed and she has somehow returned home; but she has, in fact, arrived at a world where everything, from writing to the rotation of the sun, is literally the reverse of what she once knew.
Opposite – Doppelgänger, 2019
Exhibition runs from January 31st – February 22nd, 2020
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London
N1 7RW
Doppelgänger will concurrently be on view at David Zwirner, New York, from January 16th – March 14th, 2020
