menu
search

 Screening

11 June, 18.00–13 June, 18.00 2020

 

48-hour Selma: An online screening of Tony Cokes’s Evil.27: Selma (2011)

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, Evil.27.Selma , Greene Naftali, New York, 2011; courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles en Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernandez-Valdes

For 48 hours, from Thursday 11 June 2020, 18 hrs CET to Saturday 13 June 2020, 18 hrs CET BAK’s online forum, Prospections, presents a screening of Evil.27: Selma (2011), artist Tony Cokes’s audiovisual meditation on protest and imagination against the realm of mass-image circulation and anti-black oppression in the United States. Presented as a part of Prospections’s ongoing focus, Tactical Solidarities, Cokes’s work considers the effect that instant mediation and transmission has on people’s capacities to organize in new and trenchant ways—a perennial question under particular pressure in this critical moment of rage, demonstration, and change.

The work was on view at BAK very briefly earlier this year as part of Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals, an exhibition and public program with and around the work of Tony Cokes. Cut short due to the outbreak of Covid-19, it will reopen at BAK on 16 October 2020, to run through 10 January 2021.

From the exhibition guide of Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals:

Evil.27: Selma (2011 9:00 MIN.)
“The American Civil Rights Movement took hold in a society moving from radio to television,” reads a slide from Evil.27: Selma, borrowing its core text from “Notes from Selma: On Non-Visibility” by the Alabama collective Our Literal Speed. The text is based on emblematic events of the Civil Rights era, such as the marches from Selma to Montgomery, the arrest of Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery bus boycott. Mixing this text with lyrics and soundtracking by singer and songwriter Morrissey, “The more you ignore me, the closer I get,” the work reconsiders the contemporary dominance of the image as evidence and record. By invoking a period of civil mobilization in the United States that came about in a time without mass image circulation, the video examines what is lost when “everything is instantly visible.” In redeploying modes of information dissemination, the work examines the weight of visibility as it is organized in the media to govern what is perceived as reality.

It is worth noting that Cokes’s 2019 work, The Morrissey Problem, indirectly revisits Evil.27: Selma by discussing the singer’s recent devolution into right-wing ideology, retroactively applying a critique and rereading of the lyrics and soundtracks employed in Cokes’s works. The video adapts in full a 2019 essay from The Guardian by journalist Joshua Surtees, in which the author recounts how, as a British-Jamaican longtime fan, he watched with increasing horror the descendent steps of Morrissey’s fall into fascism. Speaking in the form of a break-up letter to the singer, Surtees calls him “the pop version of Nigel Farage—the kind of person your younger self would have despised.” His words ring true to a great many of Morrissey’s disenchanted fans, Cokes among them.

Screening made possible with permission of the artist and Greene Naftali, NYC.

Made possible by

Suggestions from the archive

Learning

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

Complaint Making: Setting Up Conflict-Positive Spaces for Community Building Praxis

Vishnu would like to share feminist governance tools (FGT) focused on three of many tiers in community building praxis. FGT is based on the values of equity with an emphasis on creating psychologically safe environments, drawing on the use of consent. Decision-making processes, setting up conflict-positive spaces, and complaint-making as diversity work will form the body of this three-day training. Rooted in Vishnu’s autho-ethnographic practice, this work will explore the power dynamics that impact decision-making processes.

Performative

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

The Diamond Mind II

In this dance training, the people will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet—a sixteen page signature—that distributes their presence, their gesture, as an act of EQ. 

Learning

3 May, 12.00–4 May, 18.00 2023

Too Late To Say Sorry? 

A bad apology can ruin a friendship, destroy a community, or end a career. In this workshop, we will investigate the impact of apologies on our relationships and our worlds. Why and how do we make apologies? What can giving and receiving apologies teach us about values and integrity? Should you apologize for something you don’t really feel sorry for? We will explore conflict and how we like to be in conflict with others. We will dive into our own boundaries. We will seek to understand how honoring limits becomes an act of building (or freeing) better worlds capable of holding so many, many more of us.

Learning

28 April, 12.00–29 April, 18.00 2023

Huisje, Boompje, Beestje (D.A.F.O.N.T.)

In this rare masterclass, retired teacher and artist Glenda Martinus teaches participants a thing or two about painting with Microsoft Word. Martinus shares tips, tricks, and secrets on how to use this software to its unexpected potential as a drawing tool. Participants learn how to draw three basic objects—a house, a tree, and an animal—in a seemingly innocent exercise that perhaps contains more layered social commentary. Drawing the worlds we desire does not require expensive tools or education, simply a curiosity to understand how the monster’s tools can topple the house of the master.