Tony Cokes
15-MAY-23 – 15-JUN-23
Tony Cokes (b. 1966, Richmond, VA) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
For more than three decades, Cokes’ work has explored media and pop culture, and investigated their underlying political ideologies and impact on communities. A longstanding thread of enquiry has been aspects of race and identity, often using video incorporating found imagery, text, and seemingly unrelated colour slides. His work has covered an array of sources as diverse as Public Enemy, William Burroughs, Morrisey, Drake, and Édouard Glissant.
The work presented in the exhibition, After The Future (SM BNGRZ Rework 2) (2023) is taken from SM BNGRZ (2021), a video work outlining the meaning, ambitions and dreams concerning (queer) club culture in post-pandemic times, based, in part, on Rainald Goetz’s book Rave. Pulled from the video work and presented in both a new context and format, the text offers further contemplation and a renewed outlook on concepts of language, aesthetics, and time.
The exhibition has been kindly supported by Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Austria.
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Tony Cokes has had a wide number of solo exhibitions in prestigious museums, institutions and galleries including, most recently, Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein, Munich (2002); Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (2002); Greene Naftali, New York (2022, 2018); Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019); Bergen, Norway (2018); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012).
His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.