Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It's 2 Late, Vol. 2
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It's 2 Late, Vol. 2 provides an opportunity to see a broad range of powerful artworks made by Cokes since the 1980s, alongside two newly commissioned films. Cokes’s video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts quoting a polyphony of voices such as Louis Althusser, Malcolm X, David Bowie, Public Enemy and Donald Trump. Meeting political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes’s films starkly confront the social conditions, as well as the specific prejudices and threats encountered by black subjects. Recent works range across minimal techno, the Bush administration’s use of color to engender a perpetual culture of fear, and music used to torture detainees during the so-called “war on terror.”
Two new works will be produced for the exhibition, one of which is specific to the context of the Carpenter Center, and another will be co-commissioned by the exhibition’s three organizers. Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It's 2 Late, Vol. 2 is co-organized with Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (September 28, 2019–January 12, 2020) and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (April–July 2020). A publication with newly commissioned texts will be co-published between the organizing institutions and Goldsmiths Press, London.