'We live history from moment to moment, and one of the extraordinary things that film can do is re-create it. Still, Douglas doesn’t treat film as a documentary but as a document about storytelling and about how film can be used to elicit historical bigness. His “Birth of a Nation” (2025) is the show’s pièce de résistance. 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
Image: installation image, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight21 June–30 November 2025
Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
© Stan Douglas
Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2025
