Fellows

Thiago de Paula Souza

Thiago de Paula Souza curates Tony Cokes: To Live As Equals at BAK

BAK 2018/2019 Fellow Thiago de Paula Souza curates Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (2020–2021). 

Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals brings together selected video works from the past 30 years, immersing viewers in the audiovisual language that artist Tony Cokes has developed over his career, which typically blurs aesthetics of pop music videos and visual art.

The exhibition and program trace Cokes’s unique formation of critique through visual and textual codes, and his changing relationship to archival material over several different global historical moments. From these historical events, the works draw a through line to the present of systemic violence and ever-more-complex forms of social control. What are ways of seeing and responding to the seemingly endless cycles of inequality and oppression? How, then, could one break those cycles and envision living as equals?

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