MEET THE ARTIST: TONY COKES
10 min, color, sound
2021
Tony Cokes’ work (1956) challenges the established use and hierarchies of the three main languages of media and art — image, text and sound — and re-contextualizes cultural fragments to explore themes of structural racism, war, capitalism, and how music and mass media reflect and shape our present condition. In this interview Cokes talks about the exhibition This isn’t theory. This is history (15 July 2021 – 20 October 2021): starting with his seminal early film Black Celebration (1988) and closing with a new work commissioned for the occasion, the exhibition traces back through three decades of Tony Cokes’ work, presenting it within an entirely new framework, a hybrid between the white cube of the art space and the black box of the cinema.