David Cronenberg: Transformation

Candice Breitz/ James Coupe/ Marcel Dzama/ Jeremy Shaw/ Jamie Shovlin/ Laurel Woodcock 

Organized by MOCCA and TIFF
Curated by David Liss, Artistic Director & Curator, MOCCA, and Noah Cowan, Artistic Director, TIFF Bell Lightbox


Supported by the Government of Ontario, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Hal Jackman Foundation    

Beginning in the 1970s and throughout his four-decade career, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has explored the increasingly insidious ways in which technologies have infiltrated our lives—through our culture, our bodies, our minds and our souls, transforming what it means to be human.

For David Cronenberg: Transformation, six artists with clear affinities for Cronenberg’s films have been invited to respond to a specific theme in his work: the yearning in human beings to witness the next stage of human evolution. The artists range in primary practice, but their work reflects the enormous impact of Cronenberg on visual- arts language, and is a testament to the director’s own ongoing engagement with visual art.

There are various strategies that the artists invoke through Cronenberg’s cinema to interrogate contemporary culture. Some works within the exhibition reference specific films, scenes and scripts; others explore Cronenberg’s ideas less directly, projecting a distinctive Cronenbergian spirit or sensibility. All six artists enthusiastically proclaim to be inspired and influenced by David Cronenberg. As the concept of transformation has been at the core of Cronenberg’s films, so it is that his work has, in turn, had a transformative effect on these artists and many more of their generation.

David Liss
Artistic Director and Curator, MOCCA Noah Cowan
Artistic Director, TIFF Bell Lightbox