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Hub

John Di Stefano

2001 00:22:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Architecture, Expedition/Travel

Description

Hub proposes that the idea of home is today perhaps better expressed as a sense of being between places. Within the dalectical interplay between global processes and local environments, Hub suggests that displacement and mobility itself might be thought of as a new way of belonging. Hub uses the transitory space of the airport—defined by its arrivals and departures—to introduce the notion of disappearance to articulate new ideas on belonging and identity. Hub proposes that we think of the airport as both a type of home and a place of disappearance—not in the sense of vanishing, but rather in the sense of transformation, dis-appearing. Rather than being an "empty" space, Hub proposes that the airport becomes a rich and complex repository of interlacing personal and political histories—a new space of belonging.

"A compelling examination of that most fraught and contemporary of experiences: travel. Occasional voiceovers discussing the fragmented, global subject sound like notes taken during a Homi Bhabba lecture. And yet Hub achieves a visual grain and intensity that persuasively captures the alienating effects of travel in an increasingly mobile society. The final shot of an airplane wing lifting above the runway into a thicket of clouds, accompanied by Di Stefano's dramatic narration, is a small tour de force." —James Meyer, Artforum, Best of 2001 

About John Di Stefano

John Di Stefano is a Canadian-born visual artist, videomaker, writer, and curator, based in Sydney, Australia. John's career as an artist spans over twenty-five years. His work is focused primarily in video/film, installation, photo-based and time-based media, but has also included performance, bookwork, site-specific and public art projects. His work often examines how concepts and perceptions of memory, space/place, and time shape the articulation of subjectivities so as to reconcile the personal with the social, the everyday with history. His video work has won several awards, including the New Vision Award at theSan Francisco International Film Festival, and has been selected for official competition at various festivals including the Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille. Screenings include: Videonale - Festival of Contemporary Video Art (Kunstmuseum, Bonn); New Filmmakers - Anthology Film Archives (New York); Transmediale (Berlin); Barcelona Museum of Modern Art; Kassel Documentary Film Festival; Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); European Media Arts Festival(Osnabruck); Human Rights Film Festival(Sarajevo); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Royal Academy of Art (Copenhagen); Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels); STROM kunstfestival (Kunsthaus Rhenania, Cologne); Karsten Schubert Gallery (London). Bruno Brunnet Fine Arts (Berlin);Stockholm International Film Festival; American Film Institute Video Festival (Los Angeles); New Langton Arts (San Francisco); A-Space (Toronto); the New Zealand Film Archive (Wellington); Moving Image Centre (Auckland); Domus Artium Museum (Salamanca); Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus) and the Cinematheque (San Francisco).His video work has also been broadcast on American public television (PBS), and in 2001, was cited as one of the “best of the year” by the publication Artforum (New York). 

 

For over two decades, John's gallery-based work has been exhibited internationally in commercial and public art institutions including, Eastlink Gallery (Shanghai), William Wright Artists' Projects (Sydney), Enjoy Public Art Gallery (Wellington), Bartley+Co Gallery (Wellington), Articule (Montréal), and the British School at Rome Gallery (Italy). He has been commissioned to create public art works, and site-specific works for various institutions and venues including the New Zealand Film Archive, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). His work has been included in various public art contexts including FED TV (Federation Square, Melbourne), Projects on Lake (Pasadena, US) and Artbox Project (Wellington). John’s gallery-based curatorial projects includeSatellite (Shanghai), Open Cities (Hong Kong/Chicago), and Not On Any Map (Chicago). He has programmed film and video for the Film Centre (Chicago), the New Zealand Documentary Film Festival, and theLos Angeles International Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival. He publishes in various international journals and anthologies, most notably in Queer Looks (Routledge); in Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema (Scarecrow); in Performance: design (Museum Tusculanum); in the visual art journal Art Journal (New York) and in the cinema studies journals Wide Angle andIllusions, among others. His book-worksVITALITY [1988] and Unfold [2011] were published by Artextes Press (Montréal) and Enjoy Public Art Gallery (Wellington) respectively.

 

John is presently Associate Professor at University of Sydney - Sydney College of the Arts. Formerly he was Chair of the Video Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has also been a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), the University of California, the National Art School (Sydney), and Massey University (New Zealand). He is founding-convener of the biennial conference, Expanding Documentary (New Zealand), and an editor of the international art publication, Art AsiaPacific(Hong Kong/New York).