Now showing at LUMA Arles: David Armstrong, Liu Chuang, Maria Lassnig, Philippe Parreno, and Tony Oursler

Now showing at LUMA Arles: David Armstrong, Liu Chuang, Maria Lassnig, Philippe Parreno, and Tony Oursler
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Bodies Never Lie
Stan Douglas

  • Video installation
  • Upcoming

LUMA Arles presents Bodies Never Lie, an exhibition by Canadian artist Stan Douglas, internationally acclaimed for his films, photographs, and installations that examine how histories are constructed, mediated, and contested. Across his work, Douglas investigates the formation of collective memory, the structures of power and oppression, and the cultural forms through which resistance and emancipation are expressed—particularly music—which he approaches as both an aesthetic language and a social force.

At the center of the exhibition is a new film production entitled Exquisite Corpse set within the world of flamenco in 1950s Spain, during the Franco dictatorship. Through this work, Douglas explores flamenco not only as a musical form, but as a site of coded expression, shaped by censorship, identity, and political constraint. Using complex cinematic structures, advanced image technologies, and layered narrative perspectives, he constructs a work that unfolds through shifting viewpoints and multiple temporalities.

This exhibition will be part of the Associated Arles program of the Rencontres d'Arles.

Practical Information

From July 4, 2026 to January 10, 2027
La Mécanique Générale
2021_Vancouver_2011-06-15_REPRO-04
Credits

Vancouver, 15 June 2011, 2021 © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Vancouver, 15 June 2011, 2021 © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.
20_StanDouglas_©EvaanKheraj

Stan Douglas

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Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver, Canada) is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver.

His films, videos and photographs, which explore social rupture and the effects of technical media on human consciousness and history, have been seen in exhibitions internationally, including three documentas (1992, 1997, 2002) and four Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005, 2019). A survey of his work, Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, toured Europe from 2013 until the end of 2015. From 2014 until 2017, his theatre-cinema hybrid, Helen Lawrence, was performed in Vancouver, Toronto, Munich, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Brooklyn and Los Angeles and in 2022 he represented Canada at the 59th Venice Biennale. He received the International Centre for Photography’s Infinity Prize in 2012, the Hasselblad Award in 2016, the Audain Prize in 2019; he was named a Chevalier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 2020 and, in 2024, an Officer of the Order of Canada. Between 2004 and 2006 he was a professor at Universität der Künste Berlin, and from 2009 until 2024 he was a core faculty member in the Graduate Art department of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.