24 Hours with Tony Cokes
6 am 12 September to 6 am 13 September 2025

See full schedule here! This event is free for all.

On Friday, 12 September 2025, Amos Rex with PUBLICS will conclude its summer season with a scatter-sited retrospective exhibition featuring video works by American artist, Tony Cokes, scheduled alongside specific responses to these films with live performances by Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti), and Sonic Wilderness, a group of musicians from Finland, including Antye Greie-Ripatti aka “AGF”, Islaja, and Cucina Povera. 

For a full 24 hours, Cokes’s nearly four-decade-long artistic practice will be presented across the interior and exterior of Amos Rex. The program transforms the museum’s cinema, passageways, facade, and outdoor square into a dynamic arena for screenings, performances, and interventions.

“We are so excited to be working together with PUBLICS and Tony Cokes on what promises to be an extraordinary curatorial event. The idea to take over the whole area around the museum is something that came naturally in this process and Tony’s extraordinary works will be like a glitch in the system, a new way of seeing this public space and the digital screens that we all live with and pass by every day. We look forward to amusing, entertaining and provoking passers-by and visitors alike in an intense 24-hour period in September”, says Museum Director Kieran Long.

Working closely with the artist, the retrospective brings seminal works to Helsinki for the first time, featuring Black Celebration (1988), Fade to Black (1990), and Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–2011), 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. 

“This singular selection of works is a rare opportunity to experience my practice in spatially, temporally, and sonically diverse contexts. The ensemble extends the implications of the work in highly intensive, specific, and productive ways. I can’t wait to feel, see, and hear the results!” – Tony Cokes 

Since the late 1980s, 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 includes sloganeering posters, t-shirts and screen-printing workshops using texts, excerpts, and slogans from Cokes’ works, alongside a talk with Tony Cokes, Bhavisha Panchia, and Artistic Director of PUBLICS – Paul O’Neill.

24 hours with Tony Cokes is curated by PUBLICS with Bhavisha Panchia, in collaboration with Amos Rex.

Meet the Artist: Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes is a groundbreaking video artist known for his politically charged and visually striking work. Since the 1980s, he has used text, colour, music, and found media to challenge dominant narratives around race, capitalism, and power. His video essays remix critical theory and pop culture into rhythmic, immersive experiences inviting audiences to both think and feel.

Cokes is a Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024 and the Rome Prize in 2022–2023. His work has been shown at major institutions including Haus der Kunst, Dia Art Foundation, MoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Hammer Museum, and is part of leading collections around the world.

Curator’s note for Bhavisha Panchia 

“24 Hours with Tony Cokes is a retrospective in rhythm. Moving across different sites, it unfolds at shifting tempos. Rather than offering a fixed overview, the exhibition recomposes Cokes’ work through varying spatial and temporal arrangements, creating new connections through repetition and variation. Distributed across the museum, it invites audiences to encounter Cokes’ work as an iterative, evolving experience – embracing both accumulation and dispersion.

Cokes recomposes textual and musical excerpts into new audiovisual compositions, drawing from figures such as Mark Fisher, Donald Trump, Kodwo Eshun, Aretha Franklin, Killer Mike, and Radiohead. In this spirit of recomposing, artists AGF, Cucina Povera, Islaja, and Sasu Ripatti act as sonic interlocutors, responding to Cokes’ practice through live performances that remix and reimagine his work.”

Artists Bios

Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti)
Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti) is a pioneering sound artist, musician and sonic composer whose work defies any specific musical genre. He is a hugely influential point of reference in Tony Cokes’ work, and on September 12th he will perform a live newly commissioned musical score as part of a unique and direct sonic response to the films of Tony Cokes at Amos Rex.

Sonic Wilderness Remix Bios
Antye Greie-Ripatti aka “AGF”
Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF) is an audio sculptress, sound artist & curator/facilitator, poemproducer & intersectional feminist networker. Born in 1969, and raised in East Germany, she has lived and worked in Hailuoto, Finland since 2008. She works with language, sound, listening, voice, and politics, expressed in mixed media, audiovisual live performances, digital communication, sound installations, commissions for radio, movies and theater, exhibitions and conceptual works. Since 2020 she faciliates rec-on.org where she creates space for political sound & listening. She is member of bioartsociety.fi and has faciliateted sound camps around ‘sonic wilderness’, ‘radical mycology’ and ‘sound as growing’ and draws on feminist sound technologies with focuses on political sound and the artivist community.

Islaja
“Islaja is Merja Kokkonen: a composer, performer and recording artist who after living and working in Berlin for over a decade, is now in 2024 permanently back in Helsinki Finland. 

Since her debut in 2004, she has released four albums on Finland’s Fonal Records, one on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, one on Berlin-based monika enterprise, one on Svart Records, as well as a series of singles on labels such as Not Not Fun and Root Strata. The most recent album Angel Tape came out on Other Power in October 2023. 

With her haunting vocals and shamanic melodies, Finnish composer and musician Islaja takes her audience on a journey to other worlds. Since the experimental, psychedelic folk music of her early albums, she has long embraced “warped and left-field” electronics.  She has been compared to Björk, Syd Barrett, and Nico. She earned quick praise in the international music press for her unique vocal style and daring DIY approach to music composition, with kudos from the Wire magazine, Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes.”

Cucina Povera
Cucina Povera is the solo project of Karelian-Luxembourgish medic and composer Maria Rossi, focusing on the marginal and the observational. The repeated motifs in their work are an uncanny testament to the beauty of banality, infused with the mysticism of everyday life and a love for accessible sound sources like creaky tenement floors, boiling kettles and leaky taps – stories told by means of rudimentary synthesis of voice and field recording. Like in the titular practice of peasant cooking, Rossi takes simple ingredients and makes a stylistically resourceful, spontaneous hermeticism that primarily makes for a creative respite from the hubbub of the metropole.

Bhavisha Panchia
Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and writer of contemporary art. Her curatorial and written work centres on the social, cultural and ideological signification of sound and music in contemporary culture. With an interest in auditory media’s relationship to geopolitical paradigms, anti/postcolonial discourses and imperial histories, she considers how we can critically listen back to listen forward. She is the founder of Nothing to Commit Records, a label and publishing platform committed to the production and expansion of knowledge related to contemporary art and sound within and across the global South. She has curated programs and exhibitions locally and internationally, some of which include Sounding a Black Grammar (New York, 2023), Sounding the Void, Imaging the Orchestra V.1, A4 Arts Foundation (2019), ’32: The Rescore, Sharjah Art Foundation (2019), For the Record, ifa-Galerie Berlin (2018); writing for the eye, writing for the ear, Centre for the Less Good Idea (2018); and Buried in the Mix, MEWO Kunsthalle  (2017). Panchia holds a BA Fine Arts Degree and MA History of Art Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MA in Curatorial Practice from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, and a PhD in Art History from Rhodes University, Makhanda.