Part of Fall 2013
We are pleased to welcome Daniel Cockburn back to Toronto where he will be performing his most recent anti-artist talk All The Mistakes I’ve Made. After over nearly a decade of making videos, Daniel Cockburn has made some mistakes. Aesthetic ones, technical ones, ideological ones. If you have seen his acclaimed work then you may have noticed some of them. If you haven’t, All The Mistakes I’ve Made is your opportunity to be personally guided through Cockburn’s missteps by the artist himself. In his disarmingly sincere and precise manner, Cockburn’s artist talk-cum-methodological manifesto explores his own errors of judgment and how they are perhaps emblematic of larger negative trends in contemporary art and cinema-making. Illustrated with excerpts from his personal œuvre of artistic regret, this lecture-style performance is both playful and profound, personal and wide-reaching in its meditation on creative misguidance. But of course, it could very well be a bad idea itself.
Writer/director Daniel Cockburn’s short works inhabit an interzone between narrative film and video art, and have been screened at festivals and galleries worldwide. In 2009, Pleasure Dome presented an international tour of a retrospective of his short works, and he was a resident of the DAAD’s Berliner Künstlerprogramm filmmaker residency. A monograph on his works is forthcoming from the Canadian Film Institute. In 2011–12, he was Guest Professor at HBK Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany. He now divides his time between New York and Toronto. Cockburn’s first feature You Are Here won top prize at the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück) 2011 for “trend-setting work in media art” and was called “a major discovery” by the director of the Locarno Film Festival. It played over forty film festivals, including Toronto and Rotterdam, and has been compared to the work of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick.
“[Cockburn] has a rare literary talent which he serves up with visual élan, smart design sense and a playful philosophical project whose deeply lived roots is leavened throughout with humour.” — Mike Hoolboom
