Save the Date
Amos Rex and PUBLICS present rare and unique 24 hours with Tony Cokes, a 24-hour programme & retrospective exhibition featuring video works by American artist, Tony Cokes, alongside live performances by Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti), and an assembly of Finland- based musicians under the rubric Sonic Wilderness Remix; Antye Greie-Ripatti aka “AGF”, Islaja, and Cucina Povera.
The event runs from 6 am on 12 September to 6 am on 13 September. 24 hours with Tony Cokes is free of charge and open for all. You warmly invited – schedule out in August!
For 24 hours only the entirety of Tony Cokes film works spanning nearly four decades will be presented across the interior and exterior of Amos Rex and its surrounding sites. The program transforms the museum’s cinema, passageways, facade, and the surrounding city space of Lasipalatsi Square into a dynamic arena for screenings, performances, and interventions.
Since the late 1980s, Tony Cokes has redefined media by interweaving textual, musical, and visual elements. Through his distinctive process of cutting, assembling, and rearranging fragments of history—archival footage, news broadcasts, political speeches, pop and club culture, theoretical texts, and conversations—Cokes constructs an incisive critique of media, power, and anti-Blackness, as well as consumerism and contemporary political discourse.
The program features early works such as Black Celebration (1988), Fade to Black (1990), and his Evil Series, to more recent works such as HS LST WRDZ (2021), Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 (2022) and Testament E: MF.slow.cancel.2014 (2024), amongst others. These will be screened in the cinema, and on screens within, across, and around the Amos Rex building, and accompanied by sloganeering posters, DIY t-shirt printing workshops, and talks with Tony Cokes, Bhavisha Panchia, Paul O’Neill and others, and are accompanied by newly commissioned performances and DJ sets responding to Cokes’s works.
The event is curated by PUBLICS with Bhavisha Panchia, in partnership with Amos Rex.
Curator’s note for Bhavisha Panchia
“24 Hours with Tony Cokes is a retrospective in rhythm. Moving across different sites, it unfolds at shifting tempos. Rather than offering a fixed overview, the exhibition recomposes Cokes’ work through varying spatial and temporal arrangements, creating new connections through repetition and variation. Distributed across the museum, it invites audiences to encounter Cokes’ work as an iterative, evolving experience – embracing both accumulation and dispersion.
Cokes recomposes textual and musical excerpts into new audiovisual compositions, drawing from figures such as Mark Fisher, Donald Trump, Kodwo Eshun, Aretha Franklin, Killer Mike, and Radiohead. In this spirit of recomposing, artists AGF, Cucina Povera, Islaja, and Sasu Ripatti act as sonic interlocutors, responding to Cokes’ practice through live performances that remix and reimagine his work.”
Meet the Artist
Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes (b. 1956) is a groundbreaking video artist known for his politically charged and visually striking work. Since the 1980s, he has used text, colour, music, and found media to challenge dominant narratives around race, capitalism, and power. His video essays remix critical theory and pop culture into rhythmic, immersive experiences inviting audiences to both think and feel.
Cokes is a Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024 and the Rome Prize in 2022–2023. His work has been shown at major institutions including Haus der Kunst, Dia Art Foundation, MoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Hammer Museum, and is part of leading collections around the world.
