An exhibition by John Di Stefano at MIC

Picturing Pasolini: Subtitles And Subtexts An exhibition by John Di Stefano

Preview at The Moving Image Centre Gallery

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 1ST - 6pm until November 29th

In his exhibition, Je Me Souviens (I Remember), John Di Stefano engages with the biography of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to excise certain questions about the intersection of nationalism and sexuality embedded within the director¹s work and public life.

As a politically engaged artist and openly gay man living in the tumultuous Italy of the 1960s and Œ70s, Pasolini was continuously portrayed as a social outcast, and for this, was exiled throughout his life. His name became synonymous with scandal and Œotherness¹. He was assassinated in 1975.

Di Stefano¹s installation, comprising video projections, photography, and interactive book-works, form a sort of alternative museum, a critical reframing of the public archive of press imagery, film material, and literary production left behind by the slain filmmaker.

As a first-generation Italian-Canadian, Di Stefano¹s relationship with Pasolini is not that of a quasi-biographer, but that of a translator.

In Je Me Souviens (I Remember), Di Stefano¹s approach is that of a critical meditation which attempts to appropriate Pasolini¹s Œotherness¹ by overlapping (Pasolini¹s) biography with (his own) autobiography.

For Di Stefano, his strategy is as a means of negotiating the complexity of cultural translation and acculturation in order to suggest that we think of national belonging(s) as porous and fluid, made up of numerous overlapping symbolic and cultural experiences, all modulated with the use, and abuse, of language(s).

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John Di Stefano (BFA, Concordia University, Montreal; MFA, UCLA; PhD, Concordia University, Montreal) is an interdisciplinary artist, videomaker, writer, curator and educator. He is presently Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Massey University¹s School of Fine Art (Wellington, New Zealand). His studio work is focused primarily in video, installation, photo-based and time-based media, and has also included performance, bookwork, site-specific and public art projects as well as work in the digital realm. He has exhibited and published internationally since 1985.

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