Entering Victoria Miro’s airy London space, visitors are immediately confronted with Stan Douglas’ European premiere of Birth of a Nation, a multi-channel video installation that is as confrontational as it is meticulously composed. Across five screens, Douglas reconfigures D.W. Griffith’s infamous 1915 film, a technical milestone marred by its exaltation of white supremacy. By isolating the narrative of Gus, a newly freed Black man portrayed in Griffith’s original by a white actor in blackface, Douglas exposes the mechanics of racialised storytelling, while introducing new Black characters Sam and Tom, whose presence destabilises the original’s grotesque logic. The effect is disorienting, precise and unflinching: Gus becomes a hallucination, a spectral manifestation projected by the white characters whenever they encounter Sam or Tom, a technique that interrogates the very ways in which racial identities are perceived.
Douglas’ engagement with Birth of a Nation is both historical and immediate. Griffith’s innovations in narrative crosscutting, close-ups and fade-outs are undeniable, yet Douglas asks the viewer to confront how such formal advancements were employed to legitimate oppression. By placing Griffith’s original sequence alongside his own, Douglas collapses time and perspective, forcing a reckoning with the past that remains uncannily present. Here, video becomes a site of moral and aesthetic questioning.
The exhibition’s other component, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, extends Douglas’ enquiry into the intersections of race, class and colonial history. The photographic series stages episodes from the 18th-century comic opera Polly, a sequel to Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and precursor to Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, whose satirical critique of England’s colonial ambitions was so provocative that it was banned in its own time. Douglas foregrounds Polly’s engagement with imperial hierarchies, gender performativity and the consequences of colonialism. The photographs depict Polly Peachum’s journey to the West Indies in search of her estranged husband, the highwayman Captain Macheath, here disguised as a Black pirate named Morano. In exploring Maroon societies, communities of escaped enslaved people who established self-governing settlements, Douglas traces a history of radical autonomy, where alternative legal and social structures existed beyond the reach of empire. The title itself, drawn from 18th-century admiralty law, gestures toward a world outside national jurisdiction: a space for imagining life beyond imposed constraints, resonating with contemporary discussions of autonomy, sovereignty and justice.
Douglas’ practice situates him alongside artists interrogating historical representation and its contemporary resonances. The Canadian artist echoes the concerns of contemporaries such as Kerry James Marshall, whose paintings reclaim Black bodies and histories for the visual field, and Carrie Mae Weems, whose photographic and video work has long examined the construction of race and identity in American culture. In Europe, Douglas’ interest in historical narrative and cinematic forms finds a parallel in Isaac Julien’s meditative film installations, where the archive and fiction intersect to challenge received histories. These artists, like Douglas, are invested in the act of reconfiguration: not merely documenting history but actively questioning the stories we inherit and the ways we visualise them.
Yet Douglas’ work transcends simple historical critique. In Birth of a Nation he does not merely invert or rewrite Griffith’s narrative; he interrogates the perceptual mechanisms through which audiences consume racialised imagery. In The Enemy of All Mankind, he examines the structural forces of empire, law and colonial fantasy, reminding us that the colonial gaze is never only historical: it reverberates in contemporary social, legal and cultural structures. In combining video installation with staged photography, Douglas demonstrates a command of media that mirrors his thematic concerns – the technology of representation itself shapes our understanding of fact, fiction and the spaces in between.
Critical reception to Douglas’ approach has noted the precision and subtlety with which he navigates these treacherous terrains. Polly satirises imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class – as well as gender norms, which it depicts as performative. Similarly, Douglas’ reworking of Griffith’s Gus reflects his ongoing engagement with misidentification and perception, themes that have persisted in his work since the late 1980s. By foregrounding the technological mediation of narrative, Douglas situates the viewer in a space of active reflection, where historical understanding and contemporary consciousness are inseparable.
The significance of this exhibition lies in its insistence on confrontation without spectacle. Douglas’ work is not polemical in the sense of didactic instruction; it is rigorous, nuanced and morally exacting. It confronts audiences with histories we often prefer to forget and invites reflection on our own complicity within ongoing structures of racial, social and colonial inequality. By juxtaposing the American South’s Reconstruction-era narratives with 18th-century colonial satire, Douglas traces oppression and resistance, reminding us that these issues are neither isolated nor temporal but ongoing and interconnected.
As the European premiere of Birth of a Nation, and as a continuation of Douglas’ explorations into the intersections of narrative, technology and historical memory, the exhibition is a masterclass in the capacity of art to make the past visible in ways that are both unsettling and illuminating. It asks difficult questions: Who tells the story, who is rendered visible, and how are histories of oppression mediated through art, literature and film? In the quiet intelligence of his installation and photography, Douglas offers no easy answers – only the challenge of bearing witness, of recognising the complexities of representation, and of imagining alternative worlds, both past and future.
Victoria Miro’s presentation of Stan Douglas’ work is therefore not only a significant moment in the artist’s career, but a timely intervention in contemporary discourse around race, representation and historical memory. As we move through the five screens of Birth of a Nation and the nine photographic tableaux of The Enemy of All Mankind, we are reminded that art can be at once archive, critique and ethical reckoning – a space where history is never fixed, and understanding is always provisional.
Stan Douglas: Birth of a Nation and The Enemy of All Mankind is at Victoria Miro, London from 26 September – 1 November: victoria-miro.com
Words: Simon Cartwright
Image Credits:
1&4. Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation, 2025. Five-channel video installation, dimensions variable © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David ZwirnerInstallation view, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA, 21 June–30 November 2025Installation photography: Olympia Shannon, 2025.
2. Stan Douglas Act III, Scene VII: In which the pirate Morano (aka Captain Macheath) challenges, and is vanquished by, the Maroon Queen Pohetohee from the series, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly (1729),2024. Inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminium 150.5 x 301 cm59 1/4 x 118 1/2 in© Stan DouglasCourtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirne.
3. Stan Douglas, Birth of a Nation, 2025. Five-channel video installation, dimensions variable© Stan DouglasCourtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David ZwirnerInstallation view, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA, 21 June–30 November 2025Installation photography: Olympia Shannon, 2025.
