24 hours with Tony Cokes

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.