Stan Douglas Parallax @ Jeu de Paume

Stan Douglas, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955, 2008

The fall shows are now well underway, and I began the season with a visit to the Stan Douglas exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. The title of the exhibition, Parallax, so perfectly captures the spirit and conceptual problems explored by Douglas in his photograph and moving images. Shifting vision and perspectives are everywhere within individual images as well as in their relationship to the way that history is told. Douglas is a master of the parallax.

Take the image that accompanies the exhibition's publicity material, for example, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955. The photograph shows a crowd at the races, and most striking of all is the isolation of each figure. Those in conversation either do not have the attention of their listener or whatever they are saying draws disapproval. The man in the bottom left talks to the woman on his left who is either disinterested or unimpressed, a man in the upper left pulls a face and the woman to his left has a similarly ambiguous response. In the middle, a woman in a blue dress communicates with a man to her left, but his mind is elsewhere. Everyone is dressed up for a day at the races, but being together is not their priority. Being at the races in 1955 is about getting dressed up, placing bets, and being seen. 

Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2012
Installation view @ David Zwirner, 2016

In this show and in Douglas's images in general, we find split and double screens, public spaces representing histories appropriated into private memory, photographs presenting as film developed over time, the skewing of reality through canted frames and events continuing beyond frames that deliberately leave us wondering. In The Secret Agent, a six channel video installation, Joseph Conrad's novel displaced to the terrorist events in Portugal in the summer of 1975, perspectives change over time. The installation includes three sets of double screens, each showing a different perspective of the "hot summer." Administrators, the street, and everyday life events such as a cat walking down a street, go about their business paying little attention to the threat of terrorism. Like all of Douglas's videos, over time, history unfolds in the articulated spaces of each screen, ultimately revealing the difficulty of breaking away from social structures without an event such as a terrorist attack.

Stan Douglas, 2 March 1914, Penn Station's Half Century, 2021 

There is always something visibly artificial in the photographs: up close we see the outline of objects, the human figures standing out from their background which are often abandoned or empty places and spaces. The large format photographs look like images made from film footage, taken out of a series, not just a frame, to give the impression of events unfolding over time. This plasticity also draws attention to the impossibility of the photograph, not just its illusion and its deception, but its impossibility. This is presumably Douglas's desired effect, created through the synthesis of multiple images — taken at different times — emphasizing fabrication.

Stan Douglas, Birth of Nation, 2025

In one of the most exciting works in the exhibition, Douglas re-visions history through a re-presentation of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, 2025. In a five channel video with the Griffith film as the central image, Douglas alters, mirrors and replays the original film from different perspectives. He focusses on the sequence in which Gus is wrongly lynched for Flora's death. Douglas includes two new black characters, Sam and Tom, both freed Confederate captains, who are visions of the white men's racist imaginations every time they encounter Gus. Douglas accentuates the technical achievements of Griffith's film—pioneering narrative coherence through parallel editing, close ups, slowing down the image for important emotional resonance. In his multi-channel, multi-perspectival version, Douglas uses the same strategies to accentuate the racism, misrecognition, and to expose what official history does not show. The final frames of the video on the bottom left are in colour, showing Douglas bringing the past into the present. As viewers, we are left reflecting on the racism of today.

Stan Douglas, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008

Most of Douglas's photographs are conceived within a series of images, and one disappointment I had with this otherwise stunning exhibition was that there were often only single images from the series. That said, there were other rewards for a French audience. In a photograph that had particular resonance for Paris viewers, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971 is an eerie image looking down at an empty street with people on the fringes. The title refers to the "Gastown Riots" in Vancouver when police charged peaceful demonstrators in Maple Square, Vancouver. The protesters had gathered in response to increasing tensions between police and hippies. Although present, but not emphasized by Douglas, similar to current events in France, police were overly aggressive. Arrests and injuries from violent confrontations with the police are clearly not only a thing of the past. 

Ana Mendieta @ Tate Modern

Ana Mendieta, 

It's difficult to look at Ana Mendieta's art without seeing her death foretold. The current exhibition at Tate Modern does not mention her fall from the 34th floor of her apartment building in New York, widely believed to have been at the hands of her husband artist Carl Andre. I mention this because the work, made of blood, feathers, fire and earth is fiercely feminist and relentlessly searching for the expression of woman's connection to the ancient land and nature. As it is presented in this exhibition, Mendieta's art tells of a woman fighting to be heard amid the din of voices wanting to silence her. 

Ana Mendieta, Old Westbury, 1978, Recreated 2026

If ever there was an exhibition of a single artist's work to convince of the value of seeing the artist's development across a number of years, Tate Modern's presentation Mendieta's astonishing work shows this. The human form drawn, burnt, painted, traced and planted is always that of her own small body. More often than not, the shapes and images are vaginal, leaving no doubt that her primary concern centered on woman's place in the world, her body as an extension of nature, merged together in a spiritual harmony that has no place or need of men. In her sculptures, performances, films and drawings, trees, leaves, and the earth show the absence and silence of woman in a culturescape overwhelmed by men, as well as the violence committed on both her and nature. 

Ana Mendieta, La Concha de Venus, 1982

In, for example, La Concha de Venus (1982) the patterns of the earth give us the unmistakeable form of a woman and in the Silueta Series among othes, the woman's body is both the absent form and the clitoris of the earth. Absence is also found throughout Mendieta's oeuvre, so often the body being marked by a shadow, or a trace, a silhouette or just a negative space. And in these works, the silhouette or shadow is always removed from the body, the woman herself missing from the scene. Because she is absent, the violence is not explicit, but it is unmistakeable. 

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1973-1980

While the form remains constant, the materials, location, the medium are always shifting. Perhaps most exciting in this exhibition are the screening of a number of Mendieta's short films. In them we see her transforming, emerging, drawing, always in motion, always in the process of creating or exploring the synergy of woman and nature. In one she slowly drags her blood soaked arms down a white wall creating traces like ancient hieroglyphs along the wall. There are clear references to archaeology, ancestral ritual and neolithic cultures, very old traditions both relating to her native Cuba and her American life. The works often resemble tombs and gravesites where fire and water and snow are in a process of the exchange of life force with woman's body. And we see spaces and places where silence, absence and invisibility are remembered—or not—as forms and traces are washed away. Like the woman's body. Erased.

Ana Mendieta, Film Still from Blood and Feathers, #2, 1974

Walking through the exhibition, there's a grief in all of the works, particularly for those aware of Mendieta's premature death. That said, Tate Modern and the curators are to be congratulated  for not drawing attention to her "fall" from a window, not adding any more sensation to her death that it already attracts. Because what Mendieta has to say in her art about the fragility and vulnerability, the oppression of woman, the violence to the environment and women alike, needs to be where our attention is focussed. It is an extraordinary oeuvre and exhibited with care and creativity by Tate Modern.  

Giacometti in the Tanks @ Tate Modern

The exhibition of a dozen Giacometti sculptures in the former oil tanks underneath Tate Modern is an exquisite display of his work. The experience of being in these haunting dark spaces is breathtaking. I have seen Giacometti's men walking, women standing, their bodies trapped by the intensity of their material, in memorable settings. At the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen and here in Paris at the Montparnasse atelier being stand out displays of the emaciated, elongated bronzes. But the fragility and vulnerability of misshapen bodies so beautifully articulated by sparse lighting and hard concrete walls in the depths of Tate Modern took them to another level. 

I thought I would pop in to see these familiar works on my way out of the Mendieta exhibition, but I was so entranced by the quiet reflection, the delicacy of Giacometti's figures that I struggled to leave them. So much of the tone of the exhibition is in the chiaroscuro lighting, as if the bronze figures are shyly hiding underneath the great bulwark of a building. They are frail and vulnerable, misshapen, some even missing limbs, and their shadows distorted against the industrial walls of the oil tanks, hardened concrete with its own variations in wear and tear. Interestingly, contrary to Tate's website, I didn't think they evoked the isolation and alienation of Giacometti sculptures in other settings. Rather, they were resilient, quietly reflecting on their entrapment, enclosed by the darkness of shadow. 

The tanks were constructed for oil storage when the  building was a power station. The subterranean spaces are everything that a gallery with windows looking out to Millennium Park in Chicago are not. While Giacometti's figures are often surrounded by windows to accentuate their motion, in the underground world of the Blatnavik building, it is their stasis, their inward reflection and contemplation on their incarceration that is emphasised, making their weakness all the more apparent. This is a masterful instance of curation.