Stan Douglas Takes Home $120,000 Hasselblad Award

Canadian artist Stan Douglas has been named the 2016 winner of the Hasselblad Award, which brings a purse of about $120,000.

“His practice reflects carefully and poignantly on the history of photography and film, offering new understandings of the cultural and technological developments of both media,” the foundation said in a statement, adding that he “has an open and highly innovative approach to both analog and new digital formats. At the heart of his work lies a strong interest and commitment to social issues of race, gender, identity, and post-colonial politics, whilst maintaining a valuable self-critical perspective on the role of the artist in contemporary culture.”

Wolfgang Tillmans took home the award in 2015; Miyako Ishiuchi got the nod in 2014.

When Douglas’s multimedia presentation Helen Lawrence came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015, artnet News’s Blake Gopnik called it “the birth of a new medium” for its melding of performance and cinema. The previous year, Douglas debuted a virtual-reality–meets–video game at the Tribeca Film Festival. Also in 2014, he showed a video installation at David Zwirner Gallery, in New York, that Gregory Volk, writing for Art in America, dubbed “a rapturous ode to creativity.”

Douglas’s exhibition “The Secret Agent” opens March 31 at Zwirner Gallery in New York. Douglas also works with London’s Victoria Miro.

Among the numerous major exhibitions that have included Douglas’s work are the 1995 Carnegie International, the 1995 Whitney Biennial, the 1997 edition of Documenta, and the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Douglas was selected by a jury of five. Roxana Marcoci, jury chair, is senior curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; Elvira Dyangani Ose is a freelance curator and lector of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; Florian Ebner is head of photography st Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Duncan Forbes is co-director and curator at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and Clare Grafik is head of exhibitions at Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Established in 1979, the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation supports research and teaching in the natural sciences and photography.