Daniel Cockburn will discuss his film/video work in terms of the aesthetic and ideological missteps he has made. It will perhaps be shown that his regrets constitute a parallel body of work.
The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience. The Canadian filmmaker Daniel Cockburn gladly turns this tradition around. In his anti-artist talk, entitled “All The Mistakes I’ve Made”, he explains his oeuvre in terms of the aesthetic and ideological missteps that he’s made. Building from these mistakes, he examines to what extent his inability to properly judge is representative of a negative trend in contemporary art and cinema.
– IMPAKT Foundation, Utrecht
He 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.
– Artist-curator Mike Hoolboom
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, the exhibition group 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 2011-2012 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 40+ film festivals, including Toronto and Rotterdam, and has been compared to the work of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. You Are Here is available on DVD/VOD from IndiePix Films.
