Stan Douglas – the Secret Agent

Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent surveys three recent works by Stan Douglas (born 1960), all dealing with the politics and culture of the turbulent 1970s. The video installation The Secret Agent, which lends this monograph its title, transposes Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel to Lisbon during the upheaval following the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Disco Angola compares two roughly simultaneous moments–the hedonistic glamour of New York nightlife in the ’70s and the Angolan Civil War–in a series of eight staged historical photographs set in New York and Angola. The third work, Luanda-Kinshasa, is a six-hour jazz film set in 1974, constructed around 11 songs recorded at the legendary 30th Street Studio where the likes of Miles Davis and Glenn Gould worked. Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent includes original scripts, film stills, production shots and extensive archival material to illustrate these crucial works from Douglas’ oeuvre.