Playing with notions of time, veracity, and photojournalistic accuracy, Stan Douglas’s latest exhibition Disco Angola ‘documents’ both the emergence of disco in New York City and the end of the Portuguese colonization of Angola and its subsequent civil war. To create the staged images in the exhibit, Douglas assumed the persona of a NYC-based photojournalist who travels regularly to Angola. He draws on disco’s African influences in order to equate the movement’s rejection of mainstream values with the Angolan fight for liberation. While the images themselves are clearly works of art, what is perhaps more interesting are the larger questions Douglas raises regarding the reliability of photographs to document truthfully and to alter what we remember as history.

Disco Angola will be at David Zwirner from March 9 – April 21. In May, Douglas will be awarded the prestigious Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.

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