Bio
Joe Sarahan is a video maker, installation artist, arts administrator, curator. Winnipeg-born, ECIAD-trained but self-taught Sarahan was a pillar of Vancouver’s Video In and queer video circle beginning in 1983, a frequent collaborator of Paul Wong, Paul Lang, Lorna Boschman and with painter Attila Richard Lukacs (2002). Celebrated for his confrontational aesthetics of sexual and social outsiderdom, Sarahan’s best known work was his urban dirge Holy Joe (1987), whose acquisition and presentation by the National Gallery in its inaugural video show in 1988 led to a major censorship kefuffle involving Yellow Media and the Ontario Film Review Board. The political discourses surrounding issues which include safe sex and hegemonic white masculinity recur in this works.