The Canadian artist Stan Douglas, whose works have been shown at prestigious international art institutions such as Documenta and the Venice Biennial since the mid-1980s, is known for his highly complex and technically perfect film and video works which continually extend the possibilities of the medium in order to construct non-linear narratives and astonishing modalities of time. The conceptual and formal precision of Douglas’s films is also characteristic of his photographs.
Klatsassin refers to Akira Kurosawa’s legendary film Rashomon (1950), famous for its multiple, contradictory portrayals of a murder. In Douglas’s high-definition video, too, various individuals describe the same scene from their own point of view—a man is found dead on a deserted path in the forest—until it is impossible to know what has actually happened. Different threads of plot and time, changes of perspective, flashbacks and insertions turn an otherwise quite simple plot into a dense, many-layered whole which can never be totally grasped—not least because of the seemingly endless combinatory possibilities for combining sequences of scenes, which only start to repeat themselves after six days. The variations of interlaced plots develop like composed music—similarly animated by repetitions and motifs—which is why Douglas also refers to the film as a “Dub Western.”
Who saw what when? How sure can one be of what one has seen, of remembered images that change with time? How to assess the credibility of reports by others? Klatsassin is about the impossibility of distilling truth or objectivity from images, language, and music, underlining the constructed and fragmentary nature of all experience and identity.
In the side aisles of the Hauptraum, two series of photographs by Stan Douglas will be shown that are closely connected with the film but which constitute groups of works in their own right. The first shows deserted but obviously inhabited landscapes and pictures of interiors in British Columbia. The photographs, some of which approach the format of a cinema screen, do not offer a general view of Canada’s wide open landscape—they describe specific places that can be found on the map: Maritime Worker’s Hall, Vancouver, McLeod’s Books, Quesnel Forks, Stanley Cemetery, Barkerville, Mason’s Lodge, Spences Bridge, Walhachin.
The second series comprises portraits of the figures from Klatsassin in black and white against an empty background. Here, too, in spite of the detailed, apparently objective reproduction, many questions remain unanswered: Who is being represented? The film characters, individual personalities, or actors in a film by Stan Douglas?
