Stan Douglas's survey at Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art features a new video installation titled "Birth of a Nation" (2025), which reworks a racist sequence from D.W. Griffith's 1915 film of the same name. The installation presents the original footage alongside four new videos from different character perspectives, shot in black and white without sound, and ends with a blue screen left bare to suggest the mutability of historical images. The survey also includes earlier works like "Hors-Champs" (1992), which critiques televisual representation through a staged free jazz performance.
The exhibition matters because it showcases Douglas's long-standing practice of re-editing and remaking history to challenge dominant narratives, particularly around race and representation. By appropriating and transforming Griffith's notoriously racist film, Douglas demonstrates how artists can revisit and amend the historical record, creating new images that unsettle fixed interpretations. The survey positions Douglas's work as both a critical intervention in art history and a timely commentary on how images shape collective memory.