Stan Douglas's Doppelgänger Video Installation Explores Perspective at Victoria Miro

Stan Douglas's double square-format video installation Doppelgänger, first shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, was presented at Victoria Miro Wharf Road in London from January 31 to March 14, 2020. The work features an astronaut named Alice, a Black woman in her forties, who is teleported to a distant planet. In one narrative version, she returns normally to her space station; in another, she arrives backwards with reversed organs and passwords, leading to quarantine and suspicion as a potential terrorist. Douglas explores questions of perspective, communication, and ethics through this dual narrative structure. The installation plays with themes of cloning, doubles, and quantum theory while referencing Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris. Technical elements include a looped format, celestial imagery, double planets, and a kaleidoscopic space-parachute sequence. The work reformulates Leibniz's philosophical question about existence into 'why are there two things rather than one?' A crew member's joke connects colonizer obsessions with aliens to North America's native-settler dynamics. Doppelgänger creates a sense of zero gravity through its formal construction of forward-backward narratives and parallel stories. The installation was reviewed in the March 2020 issue of ArtReview.