Stan Douglas's Ghostlight exhibition at CCS Bard explores media politics and historical reinterpretation

Stan Douglas's exhibition Ghostlight at CCS Bard's Hessel Museum of Art presents 32 photographs and video installations that interrogate mass media's supposed neutrality. The show, open through 30 November 2025 in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, examines how cultural production serves both violent mechanisms and anti-imperial strategies. Douglas's panoramic photograph Ghostlight (2024) depicts an empty Los Angeles Theatre with a single lamp on stage, evoking theatrical ghosts and historical melancholia. His photographic series 2011 ≠ 1848 (2017–21) recreates global protest scenes from 2011, including Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City and Vancouver sports riots. The video work Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) imagines a 1970s jazz-funk recording session in New York City, connecting musical movements to Pan-Africanism and US proxy wars. Douglas's multichannel projection Birth of a Nation (2025) screens alongside D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, featuring contemporary reenactments that transform racist plotlines into studies of racial hallucinations. Throughout the exhibition, Douglas demonstrates how photography, cinema, and music within the African diaspora intersect with decolonization and liberation movements. The works reveal porous boundaries between past and present while questioning how images manufacture political consent through spectacle and identification.