Amos Rex, Helsinki
12 September 2025
with
Sonic Wilderness
Sasu Ripatti
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.
“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.” - Bhavisha Panchia
Photos:Noora Nilsén / Amos Rex