Installation view, Stan Douglas,“Luanda-Kinshasa” (2013), single-channel video projection, 6 hours 1 min (loop), color, sound (courtesy the artist, victoria miro, and david zwirner © stan douglas. stan douglas: metronome, march 28, 2025 – october 12, 2025, charlotte crosby kemper gallery, kemper museum of contemporary art, kansas city, missouri. photo: e. g. schempf, 2025.)
Exploring technology and time in a globalized era, Kemper Museum’s Stan Douglas exhibit blurs the distinction between the real and the created
To a great extent, the fake has become commonplace in art and life. From postmodernism’s interest in copies and simulacra, to the rise of “fake news” in social media networks, to deepfakes created by artificial intelligence, fakes have seeped into the very tissue of modern audiovisual media. As we live through this complex history and play our conflicting parts in pushing it along, we begin to wonder: What’s next for the fake? Where is all this taking us? And more specifically, what are the fake’s uses for the artist?
“Stan Douglas: Metronome,” a solo exhibition featuring the video and photographic work of Canadian artist Stan Douglas, takes on these questions and others. As its title suggests, the exhibition, curated by Kevin Moore and now on view at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, tracks Douglas’ abiding interest in music’s entwinement with technology and time in a globalized era.
And though it is never named as such, it is the creation of the fake — elevated to a high level of artistic practice — that powers the show.
All these pieces — selected from works spanning more than three decades — draw parallels, sound resonances, imply connections, or effect transformations between different moments and places. Substantially reinventing Kemper’s main gallery space, Douglas’ video and photographic works spatialize planetary dynamics, allowing the viewer in the gallery to become the mechanism by which disparate places and speculative histories momentarily overlap, while also foreshadowing current developments in artificial intelligence.
With just a few key pieces, the exhibition draws a compelling through-line across three decades of Douglas’ work, with the planetary dispersals and recursions of music created by Black musicians at its center. Jazz, disco and hip-hop ping back and forth between America and Paris, New York City and Angola, and London and Cairo. Douglas’ video and photographic works, ever attuned to technological quirks and the oddness of world history, dwell in the complicated relationship between music and globalism, celebrating the achievements and global reach of these musicians while also drawing out hidden congruencies and undercurrents.
Guiding the exhibition is the compulsion to restage, to replicate. Most of these pieces create detailed reconstructions of historical moments, such as the photos in “Crowds and Riots,” which depict historic uprisings and moments of unrest, carefully staging them using actors and digital tools while referencing archival footage and other data. Others construct situations that didn’t actually happen but could have. For instance, “Luanda-Kinshasa” is a more than six-hour video work that envisions a 1970s jam session organized by Miles Davis: a follow-up to his groundbreaking album “On the Corner” incorporating further elements of world music, such as Afrobeat. With “Luanda-Kinshasa’s” period-accurate costuming and other added touches such as sound engineers and record executives watching on, the piece generates a realistic portrayal of this imagined album’s recording in “a replica of the famed Columbia studio known as “The Church.”
“Luanda-Kinshasa” feels like it exists in an eternal present — and this is certainly aided by its six-hour runtime — centered on collaborative art making, as epitomized by the jam session. And why shouldn’t it go on forever? It’s the kind of ’70s expansive, funky, avant-jazz fusion that I’d be likely to let loop for hours in my headphones anyway — my version of “lofi beats to study to,” a perfect headspace invented out of an alternate past, both cosmopolitan and meditative, whose endlessness says as much about our digital conditions as it does about ’70s jam sessions.
Douglas’ pieces also pay meticulously close attention to historical forms of media technology and the ways those forms impact what can be seen and known. He loves plunking contemporary people into dated settings via outmoded media. For instance, “Hors-Champs,” a 1992 two-channel video installation, mimics a particular style of French TV-broadcast from the 1960s, in which roving black-and-white cameras capture a live performance by jazz musicians. In “Hors-Champs,” four musicians play Albert Ayler’s 1965 composition “Spirits Rejoice.” Douglas presents this performance in two edits: the “official” broadcast and outtakes from that performance. He then spatializes this relationship through the use of a single screen that hangs in the middle of the gallery, with the “official” edit projected on the front and the unofficial edit on the back, implying a little joke about getting “behind the scenes.”
Interestingly, Douglas didn’t set out with this double screening in mind — rather, after filming, he realized the alternate footage had its own charisma and incorporated it into the installation. Many pieces in “Metronome” have a similar genesis: Ever attentive and adaptive to his medium, Douglas makes adjustments as he’s working, and these adjustments become a part of his craft. Just as a painter or sculptor may respond to their materials as they create, Douglas responds to the contingencies and accidents of media production, which in turn affect the result.
The feeling of watching the videos is peculiar. Despite the overabundance of context, there is a sort of contextless quality to these videos, as if history and historical details somehow cancel each other out — a kind of weightless, groundless or timeless feel. Not timeless in the sense of “always classic,” but in the seemingly endless runtime, in the videos’ eternal present which never recedes into the past because it never was part of the past — the way that jamming “keeps” musical time without “keeping track of” clock time or historical time. We are watching something that never happened.
Depth of connection
In reference to Douglas’ practice, the word “fictional” is used in the wall text — but while “fiction” has a more reputable connotation, to me “fake” better suits what Douglas is up to. Fiction suggests building a separate world, constructing a narrative, engaging an audience through character development and psychological stakes. The fake, on the other hand, merely inserts itself into reality, not just mimicking the real but also altering it. The fake does not tell a story in itself; it merely modifies one or more already existing narratives. And while Douglas’ creations are not true “deepfakes” created by AI, there is a depth to them: in the rigor of their material realization, the invisible density of connections they make, and the dimensions of the technological virtuosity that enables them to adhere to reality.
For instance, Douglas’ 2012 photo series “Disco Angola” juxtaposes photos of the underground disco scene in 1970s New York with photos of Angola during the same period, at the time of civil war in the country. Again, these photos are “fake” — that is, staged: supposedly taken by a photojournalist character who is actually Douglas. The photos come in implied New York-Angola pairs, forging surprising, muted connections, as in the subtle transmutation of dance-fighting soldiers in Angola to choreography for the song “Kung-Fu Fighting” in New York. These echoes also symbolize deeper layers of connections including African music’s role in early disco, the exploitation of underclasses, and the many painful linkages that globalism must make below its official narrative. This depth of connection is everywhere in Douglas’ work, not so much implied or encoded as generative; the pieces arise from these correspondences, even if the correspondences then almost disappear within the piece’s production.
With its combination of global connections and audiovisual trickery, “Metronome” reminds us that postmodernism emerged in the era of globalism: that dream of a smooth globe unified by one economic system (capitalism) that dissolves national boundaries and integrates us into a world order. In today’s reality, we inhabit a complex planet with competing systems — an uneven, varied, hyper-alive mess of bundled histories that cling together through untold correspondences, no easy unity in sight. A single “globe” has become the greatest fake of all. At the same time, we are filling our planet with evolving, generative, artificial media technologies that blur the distinction between the real and the created. With these developments in mind, my instinct is to see the exhibition as caught mid-flight between art’s postmodernist past and an artificial, planetary future. It doesn’t answer any questions, but it does prime us to dwell in their uncertainty.
The scope of this transitional flight may be most apparent in “ISDN,” which takes up a massive amount of space in the middle gallery. It features two screens at opposite ends of the room. Douglas has synchronized video of rappers from London and Cairo into an exchange, even though the performances were recorded at different times (another fake). With Mahraganat-style rappers Raptor and Yousef Josef from Cairo at one end, and Grime rappers Lady Sanity and TrueMendous at the other, the viewer must turn their head side-to-side to take in the performance, visually traversing a great deal of negative space.
The runtime of “ISDN” is similarly massive in scope: It’s listed as “1523 days 17 hours 52 min (loop),” suggesting, perhaps, that it has been running nonstop since its first installation in 2022. With the impression of endlessly generated rap, achieved through seamless editing, “ISDN” also hints at a contemporary technology with inexhaustible generative capacities: AI — the specter of which has hovered over the whole show. While there is no AI-use literally involved, at least not that I know of, I would argue Douglas has been implicitly working in the space around AI for a long time. With his fuzzy overlay of fake on fact, Douglas’ production of the “more of” (more of Miles Davis; more of 1960s French jazz broadcasts, etc.) combined with the “what if” (What if Davis incorporated further elements of world music; what if we could see what the other musicians were doing during a solo) prefigures the elaborative capacities of AI. I often think that while there is much to be explored, for better or worse, in creating art with AI, there are even deeper lessons to be learned in trying to create like an AI, without its assistance. And I think that is part of what Douglas is doing.
ISDN stands for “integrated services digital network,” a type of communications system that has mostly been supplanted by faster networks, though the music industry uses it for high fidelity recording and live collaboration between musicians anywhere in the world. In “ISDN,” the viewer’s gaze itself acts as the communications network, integrating the two channels of video into a single stream. The gallery becomes a planetary space in which locations on separate continents become linked through music, technology and the viewer. With the simple physical act of turning one’s head, “ISDN” suggests that embodiment remains a crucial factor in navigating — indeed, in making — our contemporary media-driven world.
I’ll end on one final observation. It was interesting to note, during my watch-through of “Hors-Champs,” the viewing proclivities of others: how some only watched one edit, or parts of each, and how this depended on which part was playing when they walked in, as well as on the positions of other viewers in the gallery. Spaces like this always also become about the negotiations between human bodies and with others’ inferred modes of viewing. What is this person getting out of the artwork compared to you, based on their body language? Who walks over to see what, and why, and what do you do in response? Who views which narrative? Maybe the situation of “Hors-Champs,” with its double-sided screen at the center, its competing fakes that can both integrate viewers and split them apart — even doing so repeatedly, a rhythmic weaving of collective attention — could be seen as a pared-down model of our existence on this planet together.
“Stan Douglas: Metronome” continues at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., through Oct. 12. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. Admission is free. For more information, 816.753.5784 or kemperart.org.
