Secession Stan Douglas Katsassin

The Canadian artist Stan Douglas, whose works have been shown at prestigious international art institutions such as Documenta and the Venice Biennial since the mid-1980s, is known for his highly complex and technically perfect film and video works which continually extend the possibilities of the medium in order to construct non-linear narratives and astonishing modalities of time. The conceptual and formal precision of Douglas’s films is also characteristic of his photographs.

Klatsassin, the name of a Tsilhqot’in chief, is the title of Stan Douglas’s latest film, which will be shown in full for the first time at the Secession. Set in the nineteenth century in the forests of Canada’s Cariboo Mountains, the plot begins immediately after the historical events involving hostilities between the area’s native inhabitants and settlers. At the time, the discovery of gold was attracting people from a variety of places to the region.

Klatsassin refers to Akira Kurosawa’s legendary film Rashomon (1950), famous for its multiple, contradictory portrayals of a murder. In Douglas’s high-definition video, too, various individuals describe the same scene from their own point of view—a man is found dead on a deserted path in the forest—until it is impossible to know what has actually happened. Different threads of plot and time, changes of perspective, flashbacks and insertions turn an otherwise quite simple plot into a dense, many-layered whole which can never be totally grasped—not least because of the seemingly endless combinatory possibilities for combining sequences of scenes, which only start to repeat themselves after six days. The variations of interlaced plots develop like composed music—similarly animated by repetitions and motifs—which is why Douglas also refers to the film as a “Dub Western.”

Klatsassin, Stan Douglas' most recent film work, is named for a Tsilhoqot'in Indian chief.
Set deep in Canadian caribou territory during the gold rush,
the action begins right after a military conflict between the native population and new immigrants.
This volume includes two photographic series; color landscapes and black-and-white portraits of the film's protagonists.