A solitary ‘ghostlight’—left illuminated after everyone leaves the stage—serves as a quiet prelude to a comprehensive survey of the work of Canadian artist Stan Douglas at the Hessel Museum of Art. This striking large-scale photograph of the abandoned Los Angeles Theater, a two-thousand seater Baroque-style cinema, gives the exhibition its title: Ghostlight. The image is emblematic—it brings together key threads of Douglas’ practice: a passion for the stage and the staging itself, a fascination with abandoned urban spaces and an enduring obsession with the ghosts of the past. The ‘ghostlight’, that single bulb left glowing overnight as a safety measure, becomes both a literal object and a powerful metaphor. It sets the tone for engaging with four decades of Douglas’ richly layered body of work, encompassing photographs and film installations from 1992 to the present. His subjects traverse time and geography—from jazz in 1960s France, 1970s underground disco music in New York and capoeira moves in Angola, to the Gastown Riots in Vancouver, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street: It’s A Luta Continua, an ongoing struggle, echoing the slogan linked to Portugal’s anti-colonial movements that is featured in one of Douglas’ photographs of the series Disco Angola (2012).

His works revisit pivotal historical moments—not to merely reconstruct them, but to imagine alternative outcomes that challenge and expand our understanding of the present.

Technically precise and emotionally resonant, Douglas’ art weaves history, memory, literature, film and music into a distinctive, polyphonic sound that is unmistakably his own. He tells stories from multiple, often grassroots perspectives, with a sharp focus on how technology and media shape our collective memory. His works revisit pivotal historical moments—not to merely reconstruct them, but to imagine alternative outcomes that challenge and expand our understanding of the present. His practice asserts that history is not fixed but ongoing, unresolved and deeply connected to the current moment.

Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Douglas is recognised as one of the most influential contemporary artists in the world. His work has been exhibited globally—thrice at documenta and in five appearances at the Venice Biennale, where he represented Canada in 2022. His interdisciplinary practice spans photography, film, television broadcasting, augmented reality and theatre, continually interrogating the very media in which his art is realised.

At the centre of the exhibition is Birth of a Nation (2025), the artist’s first fully silent video installation. Originally commissioned for an upcoming exhibition curated by Hamza Walker in Los Angeles about decommissioned monuments, Douglas’ five-channel installation critically reimagines D.W. Griffith’s racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915)—the first film ever screened at the White House—hailed as a landmark in cinematic history for its technical innovations, its naturalism and box office success, yet also long been condemned for its overt racism and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.

Douglas’ iteration revisits a sequence of Griffith’s film known as Gus chase: Flora Cameron, the white sister of the protagonist Ben, a Klan member, encounters Gus, a freedman played in blackface. When Gus proposes to her, Flora jumps off a cliff and dies. Later, Ben captures Gus, who is lynched by the Klan. Griffith’s film reflects and fuels fears around Black male sexuality, portraying Black men as predators, serving as both a product and tool of white supremacy. Douglas expands on the Gus chase by adding four sequences that retell the story from the perspectives of Flora, Ben and two new characters, Sam and Tom – whose names deliberately allude to the fictional figures of Uncle Sam, a personification of the U.S. government and dominant national ideology, and Uncle Tom, the enslaved Black protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); originally depicted as an ally of the enslaved, his name has since become a pejorative term for a Black person perceived as overly subservient to white authority. In the film, both Flora and Ben constantly mistake Tom and Sam for Gus. They function as hallucinations, embodying Flora’s and Ben’s racist projections.

These hallucinatory figures evoke Douglas’ earlier work Not Gary (1991), part of his Monodramas series made for television. In that brief piece, a white man passes a Black man and says, “Hi Gary, how are you doing?” The Black man replies: “I’m not Gary.” Though just seconds long, the scene speaks volumes about racial projection and mistaken identity. Unfortunately, Not Gary isn’t included in this exhibition, but its resonance with Birth of a Nation is unmistakable.

Filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage, Douglas’ new scenes for Birth of a Nation echo the silent, black-and-white aesthetic of Griffith’s film—but in high definition. They drift in and out of sync with the original footage, fracturing its narrative. All five channels play simultaneously, pulling the viewer’s gaze across them, yet always leaving something unseen. As the artist notes, the viewer performs the final edit. There is no sound and no music to manipulate or carry the viewer’s emotions. In the middle of the lynching, imagined by Douglas from Tom’s perspective, the scene shifts to colour: The blue screen lifts to reveal a Los Angeles set, exposing the artifice of filmmaking. This choice shields the viewers from witnessing the full brutality of the act, while confronting them with the persistence of white supremacy in media and society. Douglas’ reworking of Griffith is not just cinematic critique—it’s a broader meditation on how white supremacy persists through visual culture and in real life. In a talk at the museum, he remarked: “Maybe the reality we live in is Birth of a Nation.” Toni Morrison wrote in her novel Beloved (1987), “anything dead coming back to life hurts”—a line that, consciously or not, echoes in Douglas’ work. The book was, in fact, an inspiration for his take on Birth of a Nation. Watching his version is painful because reviving suppressed histories is. Douglas embraces this necessity—just as he did 30 years ago with Der Sandmann (1994), a two-channel 16mm film projection that explores post Cold War Germany through the perspective of a Black East German man or Nu•tka• (1996), where colonial paranoia is voiced through sea captains' diaries—unfolding over layered landscapes of Vancouver Island. These works are, as Douglas describes, made of “local symptoms for global conditions”. The more specific his work, the more universal its impact.

For decades now, Douglas has uniquely portrayed the specificity of being Black across different geographies. In a time when the Black experience is often narrowly framed in the arts through an African American lens, it feels especially urgent to recognise and celebrate Douglas’ practice—one that consistently foregrounds specificity and reveals the multiple, intersecting layers of colonialism and the Black diaspora around the world, or as the artist puts it: “I have always depicted Black people but with a very broad sense of what Blackness actually is. What is Afro-German? Afro-Cuban, Afro-English, Afro-Canadian, Afro-American? All these kinds of Blackness are manifested in different ways.”

The show at the Hessel Museum is thoughtfully choreographed by Lauren Cornell, Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. After sitting in silence with Birth of A Nation, music begins to drift in from the adjacent rooms. My first exhibition on Stan Douglas, titled Splicing Block (2019, Berlin), explored the central role of music in his work and featured his early two-channel installation Hors-champs (1992), the six-hour video Luanda Kinshasa (2013) and photographs from the series Disco Angola (2012). I was pleased to encounter all of these works reunited again at the Hessel Museum, though I couldn’t have imagined the impact they would have following the experience of Birth of a Nation. The genesis of Black music—its revolutionary power and its healing force—is felt with renewed intensity after watching Douglas’ newest work.

A distinctive utopian sound runs through these major works—echoes of improvisation, possibility and imagined futures. It is the sound of the 1960s and 1970s—of jazz, Afrobeat, early disco, freedom movements and revolution. After seeing D.ST perform live with Herbie Hancock at The Roxy in New York, Douglas taught himself as a young man how to mix Hancock’s Rockit with Afrika Bambaataa’s Wild Style on turntables. Back in Vancouver, he began blending tracks by James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic from a hidden booth at the nightclub Faces. Today, Douglas continues to remix image and sound, reshuffling history like a deck of cards. His work poses a speculative question: What if? It moves beyond fixed narratives, blurring fact and fiction to explore not just how the past was, but how it could have been.

What if a photographer had moved between New York and Angola in the 1970s? Douglas' Disco Angola imagines the images that this fictional character might have taken. What if Albert Ayler had performed Spirits Rejoice—with its bold deviations into La Marseillaise and The Star-Spangled Banner—not only on French radio, but also on French television in the 1960s? Hors-champs imagines the final broadcast on one side of the screen, while the other reveals its outtakes: the waiting, the sweat, the interactions—the deeply human side of making music. What if the sound of Miles Davis’ On the Corner melted into Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa in a non-stop six-hour session? That’s the sonic world of Luanda-Kinshasa, a video featuring a band assembled by pianist Jason Moran. Recorded in two separate sessions—each with half the lineup—the footage was meticulously edited into a seamless six-hour performance with no repetitions. Consequently, in Douglas’ hands, “what if” isn’t solely a question but becomes a mode of artistic freedom.

Before leaving the exhibition, one encounters the ‘ghostlight’ once more—still burning in an abandoned cinema in Los Angeles. The photograph acts as both an entrance and an exit to the survey. Given that the exhibition takes place on U.S. soil and I had just returned from Los Angeles—the city where protests against the I.C.E. raids were just unfolding, echoing some of the riots depicted in Douglas’ photographs – and the city where Birth of a Nation was shot—the survey Ghostlight feels like a quiet beacon in dark, turbulent times. The ghosts of the past are still haunting us. But: What if things had been different—and how can we even begin to imagine alternative paths to what now seems inevitable? The artist Stan Douglas might know.

‘Stan Douglas: Ghostlight’ is on view at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, from June 21 – November 30, 2025.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.