The Jeu de Paume in Paris presents Parallax, the largest exhibition devoted to Canadian artist Stan Douglas in France in over thirty years. Bringing together approximately forty works, including photography, film and video installations, the retrospective spans his career from the late 1980s to the present, exploring the relationship between history, memory and visual representation. Throughout his practice, Douglas has challenged conventional historical narratives by reconstructing forgotten events and questioning the reliability of images. The exhibition’s title refers to parallax, the apparent displacement of an object depending on the observer’s position, reflecting his interest in how different perspectives shape our understanding of the past.

Photography plays a central role in his work. Series such as Crowds and Riots (2008), Midcentury Studio (2010–2011), Disco Angola (2012) and 2011 ≠ 1848 (2017–2021) combine meticulous historical research with elaborate staging, blurring the boundaries between documentary evidence and fiction. His photographic project Penn Station’s Half Century (2021) similarly reconstructs episodes from the history of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Cinema and music are equally important to Douglas’s artistic language. Installations such as Hors-champs (1992), Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) and ISDN (2022) draw on jazz, popular music and cultural exchange to examine questions of race, class and social inequality. Other works, including Inconsolable Memories (2005) and The Secret Agent (2015), experiment with fragmented narratives and continuously changing sequences. Among the exhibition’s highlights is Birth of a Nation (2025), presented in France for the first time. Revisiting D. W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 film, Douglas deconstructs its racist imagery and narrative conventions, exposing the prejudices embedded in one of early Hollywood’s most influential productions. Through photography, moving images and experimental storytelling, Parallax invites viewers to reconsider how history is recorded, interpreted and remembered.

The exhibition is accompanied by Stan Douglas: Parallax, a 216-page catalogue co-published by JBE Books, Jeu de Paume and MACBA. Featuring 130 images and contributions by Stan Douglas, Gloria Moure, Tina Campt and Christine Ross, the publication offers a broader perspective on the artist’s work.

Curated by Gloria Moure and Marta Ponsa, with exhibition design by Cécile Degos, the exhibition is co-produced with the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), where it will travel in autumn 2027.