The Paris Bourse de Commerce presents a captivating exhibition on Canadian artist Stan Douglas until june 2022.
A video installation
After the presentation of the musical and visual installation Offspring by Pierre Huyghe as part of the “Ouverture” exhibition of the new Pinault Collection museum, the video installation by Canadian Stan Douglas is presented in the Studio de la Bourse de Commerce. Stan Douglas’ film Luanda-Kinshasa takes as its setting, carefully reconstructed, the legendary recording studio of Columbia Records, as it was in the 1970s. Known to all as “The Church”, installed in a former Armenian church, this mythical New York studio, which saw Miles Davis play and Aretha Franklin sing, hosted some of the most emblematic recordings in the history of contemporary music from 1949 to 1981.
A fictitious musical recording
Luanda-Kinshasa retraces a fictitious musical recording. Musicians improvise a piece together in a visual environment which, from the clothing style of the protagonists to the recording equipment, helps to recreate a vintage and paradoxically unclassifiable, timeless atmosphere. A quirky recollection. The film composes and recomposes the montages randomly to offer an almost hypnotic loop of 6 hours of music in immersion. The title refers to two historical events: the legendary boxing match between Mohamed Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1971 and the liberation of the Angolan capital Luanda in 1974-1975. Bathed in the imagination of this middle of the seventies, surrounded by fake girlfriends, fake technicians, fake journalists, the three guitarists, four percussionists, two keyboards and the only clarinetist, embody their roles with disturbing and meticulous fidelity.
A political dimension
Without names, without words, entirely fictional, this jazz funk jam also conceals a political dimension. Douglas says that he was also inspired by an idea of Jacques Attali postulating that musical formations can anticipate, carry a vision of new social formations. Faced with this film, caught up in the big screen, the spectator attends, fascinated, at a moment that he senses as key, behind the scenes of the history of music and yet faces a fiction, carried away in an indefinite time. and subjective, immersed in an almost infinite compositional process.
The Seventies New-York music scene
The artist returns to the African roots of the New York music scene of the seventies. The imprint of Afrobeat is significant there, with a marked interest in musical interbreeding. The virtuosity of the musicians, their playing both individual and collective, becomes palpable, jubilant throughout this improvised score.
The most avant-garde works of contemporary art
Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960, where he lives and works. He produces works (films, photographs and installations) that show certain places or events in a new light. He is interested in the social aspect of progress in Western societies, in particular in utopian philosophies, as well as their politically and economically divisive effects. His questioning of the structural possibilities of film and video, supported by elaborate narrative frameworks, has produced many of the most avant-garde works of contemporary art. Stan Douglas draws on the genre of Hollywood films (including detective films and the western) and classic literary works (especially those of Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville and Franz Kafka) to create the contextual frameworks of his projects. complex, the fruit of long research.
Bourse du commerce
From December 20, 2021 to June 13, 2022
2, rue de Viarmes,
75001 Paris
https://www.pinaultcollection.com/fr/boursedecommerce/stan-douglas
