An embracive and well-documented overview of three works by Stan Douglas covering the emergence of political and multicultural emancipation projects during the Seventies, from Portugal's 1974 revolution and the end of colonialism, to the emergence of multicultural music such as jazz-rock, funk, disco, and afrobeat.
The Museu Coleção Berardo in collaboration with Archive Books is publishing the book History and Interregnum. Three Works by Stan Douglas to mark the exhibition, featuring an extensive essay by Pedro Lapa, the artistic director of the museum and the curator of this exhibition, which takes an in-depth look at the “trilogy” made up of Disco Angola (2012), Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) and The Secret Agent (2015). The book, which is replete with illustrations of these three works as well as two series of photographs showing their production, also includes the final version of the script for The Secret Agent by Stan Douglas himself.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Stan Douglas. Interregnum” at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, from October 21, 2015, to February 14, 2016.
Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (born 1960 in Vancouver, where he lives and works) has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects.
