JOHN DI STEFANO
THEOREM [2002/2015]
Mixed media installation: Single-channel digital video projection - 01:35:26 - silent - colour - 4:3 | Other materials: digital photograph, glass, wood | installation dimensions: variable
VIEW: https://vimeo.com/108900827
THEOREM superimposes the English subtitles from Pasolini’s film Teorema [1968], onto the police photograph of Pasolini’s corpse taken at the scene of his murder. The utopic and revolutionary ideas set forth by Pasolini in Teorema are mined in the absurdist hope that in the ‘floating’ and dislodged English subtitle text we might find an explanation for his untimely and tragic political assassination.
Part of the 'Pasolini Project' (1990-2022) - a project inspired by Italian filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. The series of works negotiate the complexities of the personal and the political by examining and mining Pasolini’s works and cultural artifacts in a quasi-archaeological and documentary-driven manner using tropes of the archival, the photographic and the indexical.
Included in the exhibitions JE ME SOUVIENS (Articule Gallery, Montreal); JE ME SOUVIENS [I RMEMEBER] (A-Space, Toronto); PICTURING PASOLINI (Moving Image Centre, Auckland); TEXTS & SUBTEXTS (New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington) and BANDIERA NERA (SCA Galleries, Sydney)