Douglas Coupland

Biography

Douglas Coupland is a writer and artist best known for his observations on modern-day North American culture. Since 1991, Coupland has written 13 novels, which have been published in 35 languages, and he has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company. He is also a columnist for The Financial Times of London as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS Magazine and Vice.

In 2016, Penguin published The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, a book co-authored by Coupland, Shumon Basar and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Its sequel, The Extreme Self, will be published in early 2020 and forms the core of an exhibition in late 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Coupland’s exhibition on ecology titled Vortex opened in May 2018 at the Vancouver Aquarium and was on view for 18 months. He has also mounted two separate museum retrospectives: Bit Rot at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and Villa Stuck, Munich (2015–2017) and everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2014–2015). He was artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris (2015–2016).

He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, Officer of the Order of Canada, Officer of the Order of British Columbia and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres as well as a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Born in 1961 in CFB Baden–Soellingen, Germany, Coupland currently lives and works in Vancouver.

SAF participation:
Art in The Age of Anxiety (2020)

March Meeting 2019