Victoria Miro is delighted to present Stan Douglas’ sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, which features the European premiere of the Canadian artist’s multi-channel video installation, Birth of a Nation, and works from a new photographic series, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly.
Since the late-1980s, Stan Douglas has examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction while simultaneously scrutinising the media he employs, technology’s role in image making and its influence on our understanding of reality.
This exhibition marks the UK premiere of Birth of a Nation, Douglas’ new multi-channel video installation that confronts D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a technically groundbreaking but deeply racist work that exalts white supremacy. Douglas’ video installation is shown together with photographs from The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, a series in which Douglas stages scenes from the eighteenth-century comic opera Polly, written by English dramatist John Gay (1685–1732) and the sequel to his The Beggar’s Opera.
Each of these works, although drawn from historic references, engages with a range of themes such as race, class and gender, that remain highly relevant today.
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Birth of a Nation
Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation, 2025
Installation view, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA, 21 June–30 November 2025. Installation photography: Olympia Shannon, 2025
Birth of a Nation is commissioned by the Hartwig Art Foundation with the Brick, Los Angeles
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‘Birth of a Nation… reinvents the racist epic at the origin of American cinema as a Freudian hall of mirrors. On one of the five screens, Douglas presents the original stomach-turning sequence known as the “Gus chase”… On four other screens, in high-definition video – contrasting with Griffith’s grainy images from 1915 – Douglas adds two new characters of his own invention, both Black freedmen who get caught up in a Hollywood nightmare of misrecognition.’
– Jason Farago, The New York Times
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The innovations of D.W Griffith’s film, including the introduction of narrative cross-cuts and a progressive use of techniques including close-ups and fade-outs, stand in stark contrast to its subject matter. Based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s popular 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Griffith’s film is set during the American Civil War of the 1860s and into the subsequent Reconstruction period and was intended to redress any progress towards racial equality made between that time and its creation.
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Douglas presents Griffith’s original sequence as one channel of the installation, accompanied by four others which feature a new, modified version, scripted and filmed by the artist. Two new Black characters are introduced: Sam and Tom, both also freedmen and Confederate captains. Gus, meanwhile, is reconfigured to become an amalgamation – a hallucination projected by the white characters whenever they encounter Sam or Tom. This blurring of identities, whereby the Black characters are collapsed into one perpetrator, echoes themes of racial perception and misidentification found across Douglas’ work.
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‘It’s a deconstruction of D. W. Griffith’s amazing film The Birth of a Nation, from 1915, which a number of critics and filmmakers consider the birth of modern cinema – and which introduced racist tropes that infect “entertainment” to this day. Douglas takes the pain and confusion of some of those images out of your heart by showing both the real feeling and the artificiality that go into telling any kind of story at all.’
– Hilton Als, The New Yorker
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The Enemy of All Mankind
Stan Douglas, Overture: In which Convicted Brigand Captain Macheath is Transported to the West Indies Where He will be Impressed into Indentured Labour, 2024 -
Douglas’ video installation is shown together with photographs from The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, a series in which the artist stages scenes from the eighteenth-century comic opera Polly, written by English dramatist John Gay (1685–1732). A sequel to Gay’s well-known The Beggar’s Opera, which was later adapted by Bertolt Brecht as The Threepenny Opera, Polly satirises England’s colonial ambitions and their destructive potential. Too pungent a satire for eighteenth-century England, the work was originally banned from performance and never staged during Gay’s lifetime.
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Douglas, intrigued by the opera’s stance regarding England’s colonial presence, was especially interested in the ways in which Polly ‘satirises imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class.’
Douglas, intrigued by the opera’s stance regarding England’s colonial presence, was especially interested in the ways in which Polly ‘satirises imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class - as well as gender norms, which it depicts as performative’.
The plot follows the eponymous Polly Peachum as she journeys to the West Indies in search of her estranged husband, the highwayman Captain Macheath. There, Polly is unknowingly sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. Eventually securing her freedom, she is advised to disguise herself as a young man to avoid unwanted male attention and finds herself embroiled in a series of skirmishes among colonial settlers, pirates and the local native population.
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Stan Douglas, Act III, Scene VII: In which the pirate Morano (aka Captain Macheath) challenges, and is vanquished by, the Maroon Queen Pohetohee, 2024
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‘The refinement in Douglas’s increasingly complex perspectives and fragmentation via mirrors, and then the expansion of the story into somewhat claustrophobic landscape settings, reflects the dislocations of the narrative and its complications of class, race, and gender.’
– Jason Rosenfeld, The Brooklyn Rail
To create the photographs, which were shot in Jamaica using Hollywood-level production effects, Douglas enlisted a cast of actors to read from a loose script that he adapted for his chosen scenes. He modified certain characters and elements to bring the themes in line with the present day. For instance, while in Gay’s opera Macheath disguises himself as a Black pirate named Morano, Douglas reimagines him as a Black man passing as white in London, who, once in the West Indies, drops the disguise and lets his hair grow out.
The resulting photographs are sweeping tableaux where characters and settings vividly converge. Retaining Gay’s sense of comedic folly and satire, the images bear traces of the various forms of media through which they have been filtered, employing formal elements drawn from theatrical, cinematic and photographic conventions. Accordingly, Douglas positions the viewer as a spectator – a voyeuristic witness to the various narrative turns and apparent absurdities, in which love and loyalty are often transactional. -
Stan Douglas, Africa Rock, 2024
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‘There is no truly original cultural form; everything is always built on something else, otherwise it could not be understood. So I’m being honest about where these influences come from, but I’m also interested in what they meant in their own time so we can consider them diachronically.... I make works that in a sense are a place you go to, it’s not a narrative that you witness.’
– Stan Douglas in conversation with Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Ghostlight
Stan Douglas, Ghostlight, 2024 -
‘Ghostlight… shows the interior of the darkened and vacant Los Angeles Theatre from the central orchestra, with a single incandescent bulb glowing onstage in a floor lamp – a superstitious acknowledgement of the specters that haunt our stories.’
– Jason Rosenfeld, The Brooklyn Rail -
About the artist
Stan Douglas on set for the making of The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly. Photography: Mariko Munro
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Related
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Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, a major survey at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art
June 19, 2025The presentation (21 June–30 November 2025) will feature the North American premiere of an immersive and multi-channel video installation by the artist, and a selection of nearly 40 works from... -
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight is reviewed by Hilton Als in The New Yorker
August 1, 2025'Douglas takes the pain and confusion of some of those images out of your heart by showing both the real feeling and the artificiality that go into telling any kind... -
The New York Times features Stan Douglas: Ghostlight
July 17, 2025'The show at Bard... captures Douglas’s commitment to art as a practice of reconstitution: of putting the past in the service of the present, restaging turning points and letting the... -
Stan Douglas: Metronome at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
March 6, 2025The exhibition (27 March–11 October 2025) showcases three major video works, each focused on the theme of music.
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Explore our autumn exhibitions
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Stan Douglas: Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind
26 September – 1 November 2025 London Gallery IStan Douglas’ sixth solo exhibition with the gallery features the European premiere of his multi-channel video installation, Birth of a Nation, and works from a new photographic series, The Enemy... -
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: Incantations
26 September – 1 November 2025 London Gallery IINew paintings by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, including works from the artist’s acclaimed Atom series. -
John Kørner: Venice Lido Light
13 September – 25 October 2025 VeniceNew painting and sculpture by John Kørner commenced during a residency with the gallery in Venice. -
Victoria Miro Projects – Talia Levitt: 24/7
3 September – 19 October 2025 Miro PresentsThis new body of work reflects New York-based artist Talia Levitt’s joyful, chaotic and creatively charged experience of becoming a mother while carrying forward cultural and familial traditions — a...
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