Tony Cokes film programme

4 – 21 April Kunsthal Charlottenborg is proud to present a film programme with films by Tony Cokes.

Tony Cokes’s most recent work, The Queen is Dead 07.3. is shown alongside one of his more classic works, Evil.16 (torture.music). Both films demonstrate the power of music and what it can give rise to. Against an alternately red and blue background, Evil.16 (torture.music) unfolds how music can be used as torture, as destruction and audio-noise aiming to make prisoners speak. Conversely, The Queen is Dead 07.3 – set against an undulating golden background – celebrates the other aspect of the affective power of music: its ability to move us, its creative powers, its beauty.

Cokes’s Evil series addresses the political situation in the USA and the ways in which American culture has been presented, especially after 11 September 2001. The Queen is Dead 07.3 is an entirely new work originally created for the exhibition Della’s House in Los Angeles: more than anything, it is an homage to Aretha Franklin and her huge significance within American culture and how it relates to women, black people and music – right from Franklin’s first album was released in 1962 up until she sang My Country, ‘Tis of Thee at the inauguration of president Obama in 2009.

Tony Cokes has developed his distinctive visual language since the 1980s, combining pointedly political texts with music and monochrome backgrounds and presenting them together as a kind of cinematic slide show. Cokes samples text, sound and images to create new messages while also reminding us of how powerfully the media of a given period can affect how we view the world. Colours can affect our mood, text can inform us and songs can turn into soundtracks of our lives, get under our skin and act as clear memories of specific experiences.

Tony Cokes (1956) is a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence. He has exhibited extensively in the USA and Europe for decades.

The film programme is curated by Anne Mikél and is screened in Kunsthal Charlottenborg Art Cinema throughout the opening hours unless otherwise informed.