6 am 12 September to 6 am 13 September 2025

On 12 September 2025, Amos Rex closes the summer season with 24 hours with Tony Cokes – a rare and unique 24-hour programme & retrospective exhibition featuring the American artist’s video works, multiple live music performances and other pop-up events.

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. This you should not miss!

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 by AGF, Cucina Povera, Islaja and Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti).

The event is curated by PUBLICS with Bhavisha Panchia, in partnership 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.