Bodies Never Lie

Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) is a pioneering photographer and filmmaker who, for more than four decades, has transformed the possibilities of lens-based media. His work revisits specific historical events, musical forms, and cultural narratives in order to ask how history is produced, represented, and remembered. With exceptional attention to image, sound, editing, and display, Douglas creates works in which the past is never closed but returns as a field of unresolved tensions that continue to shape the present.

For Bodies Never Lie Douglas has been commissioned by LUMA Arles to create Exquisite Corpse, a new multi-channel video installation set in Francoist Spain in the 1950s. At that time, regional forms of flamenco were marginalized, while the regime sought to standardize and commercialize flamenco as a symbol of nationalist culture. As in much of Douglas’s work, Exquisite Corpse is a precise and complex staging. Filmed in spring 2026, the work depicts three informal flamenco sessions in three distinct locations: the caves of Beas de Guadix, workers’ homes at the salt flats of Cabo de Gata, and an olive mill rented for a wedding in the province of Granada. The film, displayed at the center of the exhibition, is structured as a tripartite exquisite corpse, evoking the Surrealist game celebrated by André Breton, in which separate contributions produce unexpected sequences, juxtapositions, and collective forms.

The exhibition also includes a selection of film and video works that contextualize the new commission. In the two-channel video Hors-champs (1992), first shown at documenta IX in Kassel, Douglas filmed free jazz musicians in a style recalling French television of the 1960s. One side of the double-sided screen presents a polished television edit, while the other reveals footage that would normally remain unseen. Free jazz, with its rejection of conventional harmonies, chord progressions, and regular tempos, was closely associated with political liberation in the 1960s, especially in Paris, where several Black American musicians lived in self-imposed exile. Other works in the exhibition also explore this French context, including Vidéo (2007), filmed in a Parisian suburb, and the split-screen, retro-futurist Doppelgänger (2019), set in French Guiana.

The exhibition also presents three of Douglas’s major photographic series: 2011 ≠ 1848 (2017–21), Penn Station’s Half Century (2021), and his recent body of work The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly (2024). Each engages with historical narratives of social and political upheaval and moments when established orders fracture and new, uncertain realities emerge. In 2011 ≠ 1848, for example, Douglas contrasts episodes of protest, riot, and occupation from 2011 with the bourgeois revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, using meticulous detail and technical sophistication to show how histories echo without simply repeating.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from the American choreographer and dancer Agnes De Mille, niece of Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, who wrote, “The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music. Bodies never lie.” In Douglas’s work, bodies, sounds, and images become witnesses to history, revealing what official narratives often suppress.

This exhibition will be part of the Associated Arles program of the Rencontres d'Arles.