Stan Douglas vincitore dell'Hasselblad Award 2016

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The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce that Canadian artist Stan Douglas is the recipient of the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for the sum of SEK 1,000,000 (approx. EUR 110,000). The award ceremony takes place in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 17, 2016. The day after, on October 18, an exhibition of Douglas’s work will open at the Hasselblad Center. On the same day, the Hasselblad Foundation will host
a symposium with the award winner, and a new book about Stan Douglas will be published by MACK.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the 2016 Hasselblad Award Winner
Stan Douglas: »An artist of outstanding signi cance, Stan Douglas has received international recognition for his powerful photographic art, as well as his work with video and lm. His practice re ects carefully and poignantly on the history of photography and lm, o ering new understandings of the cultural and technological developments of both media. Furthermore, Stan Douglas has an open and highly innovative approach to both analogue and new digital formats. At the heart of his work lies a strong interest and commit- ment to social issues of race, gender, identity and post-colonial politics, whilst maintaining a valuable self-critical perspective on the role of the artist in contemporary culture.«
The 2016 Jury, which submitted its proposal to the Hasselblad Foundation’s Board of Directors, consisted of:
Roxana Marcoci, Chair
Senior Curator of Photography,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Elvira Dyangani Ose
Freelance Curator and Lector of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, London
Florian Ebner
Head of Photography, Museum Folkwang, Essen
Duncan Forbes
Co-Director and Curator, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
Clare Gra k
Head of Exhibitions, Photographers’ Gallery, London

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he currently lives and works. He attended the Emily Carr College of Art + Design from 1979 to 1982. From 1982 to 1983, he made installations with projected slides, which he presented in movie theatres. In 1989 his rst series of short works for televi- sion, the twelve Television Spots (1988), were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidenti ed, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities ba led viewers. In 1992 Douglas’s Monodramas (1991), were broadcast on Toronto and Vancou- ver television to similar e ect. That same year, the artist edited and designed the book Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art (1991). In 1992, as the guest of the Centre Georges Pompidou, he created Hors-champs, which looks at the free jazz developed by African American expatriates in Paris in the 1960s. In 1997–98, he worked on a series of photographs, Detroit Photos, that document the devastated American city and its auto industry. A related lm installation, Le Detroit, was completed in 1999. Through the Detroit projects, he pursued an interest in the interrelationships between people and urban spaces in North America.
Working mostly as a lm director, Douglas has the ability to orchestrate large casts, costumes and stage design to revisit historic moments. His critically acclaimed photographic series Crowds and Riots (2008) explores crowd phenomena in the twentieth century in his native Vancouver. In a more recent photographic project, Midcentury Studio (2010–11), Douglas assumed the role of a ctional photographer, chronicling the rise of press photography in post-war North America, between 1945–1951. In his subsequent series, Disco Angola (2013), Douglas took on the identity of an early 1970s photojournalist portraying in parallel the civil war in Angola and the burgeoning underground disco scene in New York. His project probes wider political questions about the relationship between anti-establishment disco and revolutionary impulse. At its nascence disco lifestyle was an underground, late-night phenomenon in abandoned warehouses. Evolving out of funk and soul, it mobilized people of all ethnicities and sexual orientations. Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango is credited for writing the rst disco hit, the song »Soul Makossa« (1972), and the movement as a whole took much of its inspiration from the African continent.
Since the late 1980s Douglas has produced works that are layered with speci c observations pertaining to the future of civil society and o ers a profound analysis of the contemporary subject rooted in a range of source material that includes the writings of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Theodor W. Adorno and E.T.A. Ho mann, and the lms of Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles. His work engages the distance between the histories of photography and of cinema, always in relation to the contemporary spectator. Douglas also has a strong relationship to performance art, both as an artist performing as the photographers whose styles he inhabits, and as a director, working with performers to create the most stunning mise-en-scènes.
Douglas’s work has been featured in major group exhibitions, including the 1995 Carnegie International; the 1995 Whitney Biennial; the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster; the 1997 Documenta; the 1998 Berlin Biennial; the 2000 Biennale of Sydney; the 2001 Istanbul Biennial; the 2002 São Paulo Biennale; the 2002 Documenta; the 2005 Venice Biennale; and the 2011 Moscow Biennale, among many others. A selection of large-scale solo exhibitions of the past decade includes presentations at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Carré d’Art-Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes (2013); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2012); The Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunst- verein, Stuttgart (2007); and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2005).
Stan Douglas is represented by David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London; and Victoria Miro, London.
The Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 under the terms of the last will and testament of Erna and Victor Hasselblad. The purpose of the Foundation is to promote scienti c education and research in photography and the natural sciences. The Foundation’s annual international award for outstanding achievements in photography, awarded in 2016 to Stan Douglas, is considered one of the most prestigious photography awards worldwide.
The Foundation holds a collection of photographic art focusing on Hasselblad Award Winners and Nordic photographers. In the Hasselblad Center, situated in the Gothenburg Museum of Art, three exhibitions are shown annually,
one of which presents works by the current year’s Hasselblad Award Winner. Further stipends for studies and residencies are awarded each year, and
the Foundation itself is actively engaged in the eld of academic and artistic research through the publication of books, organization of seminars, and other public events.
www.hasselbladfoundation.se