Partners in Art is proud to support one of the country’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Stan Douglas representing Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale, the prestigious art exhibition that brings together artists from around the world. Based in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Douglas is internationally known for his multidisciplinary work, which includes photography, multi-channel film, video installation and, more recently, multimedia theatre production. The Venice installation Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848, curated by Reid Shier, presents a series of works across two venues. The works are inspired by historical events of social and political turbulence, as seen in Europe in 1848 and within a global context in 2011. In his characteristic style, Douglas connects points of rupture within a global framework, rendering in minute detail and with technical ingenuity these historic moments of protest, riot and revolution.

The Canada Pavilion presents four large-scale panoramic photographs in which the artist has combined high-resolution photographic plate shots of various sites with complex staged re-enactments of major events of social unrest in cities around the world in 2011: Tunis, Vancouver, London, New York. The Tunis photograph captures the January gathering that defied the nighttime curfew in protest of the country’s corrupt regime and led ultimately to the onset of the Arab Spring. In June, mayhem broke out in the streets of Vancouver when fans took to the streets following the loss of the Canucks to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup final. In London in August, the riots that erupted at the Pembury Estate in the eastern borough of Hackney, following the police killing of Mark Duggan, would ignite the spread of similar events across the UK. In New York City in October, the march by Occupy Wall Street protesters resulted in some 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge.