At the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until March 19

The mainstream media has been a steady muse for Stan Douglas. From his Television Spots in the late '80s to more recent productions like 2003's Suspiria (inspired in part by the 1977 horror film of the same name) and 2001's Journey Into Fear (referencing Orson Welles's 1942 movie), the Vancouver artist has shown a talent for manipulating the tools of mass culture-primarily film, video, and photography-to produce savvy deconstructions of power and product. Embedded in his technologically complex works are layer upon layer of the artist's own research, ranging from regional histories to widely distributed Holly?wood productions.

Inconsolable Memories is Douglas's current and much-anticipated offering. This film installation, presented at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery with a series of large-scale digital photographs, is based on the artist's latest research subject: postrevolutionary Cuba. As mentioned in the introduction to the exhibition's accompanying catalogue, Cuba stands as an "ideological relic of the twentieth century", defiantly resisting market-driven advances dominant elsewhere in the world. Both laudable and sad, its now-doddering regime simultaneously symbolizes resilience against global capitalism and a kind of anachronistic stasis. A culture hangs in the balance, and it is this fragile, waning condition that Douglas mines in Inconsolable Memories.

The crisp, expansive photographs document buildings, neighbourhoods, and businesses in Havana whose physical structures tell the story of the country's difficult past: lavish buildings built pre-revolution have been deserted by their original owners-banks, hotels, churches-and modified to fit the needs of existing people and communities. They are visual and structural hybrids, the practical necessities of postrevolutionary life seemingly grafted into their walls. These photographs provide a documentarylike foreground to the exhibition's centre?piece: Douglas's new film work.

Based on a 1968 movie by Cuban director Tomíƒ ¡s Gutiérrez Alea, it loosely tells the tale of Sergio, a black architect in Havana at the time of the notorious Mariel Boat Lift incident. In 1980, President Fidel Castro temporarily lifted restrictions keeping Cubans from leaving the country, resulting in the mass exodus of some 125,000 people to the United States. Sergio is given the opportunity to join the Marielitos but inexplicably decides to stay, despite hostile circumstances plaguing him in his homeland. He remains in limbo, and the film's shifting, disjointed narrative alternates between flashbacks of friends and family departing Cuba, his incarceration for unspecified contraband sent to him by a recently emigrated friend, and an obsession with a woman now living in his old apartment. Narratives of resistance mingle with those of displacement, malaise, and a nagging hint of betrayal. Douglas recasts the context of Alea's original work (the American embargo of 1961, not the Mariel Boat Lift, inspires the exodus) and one gets the feeling that history, like Sergio's existential angst, repeats itself.

The structure of the film reflects this recurring anxiety. It is created using two 16-millimetre film loops, unequal in length, each composed of scenes interspersed with sections of blank film. The two loops are simultaneously projected onto the same screen, building the illusion of a single film reel while projecting a different configuration of scenes each time a loop repeats. Without a discernible beginning or end, Inconsolable Memories runs inconsolably, and linear chronologies recede into worried, circular reiterations. The perpetually looping narrative, the apparent randomness of the storytelling-both undermine the possibility of closure for Sergio's character and the history he inhabits. The work is a generous portrait, a true reflection of conflicts unresolved by time.