Lisson Studio featured in new Tony Cokes video work

15 July 2020

A new work by American artist Tony Cokes, featuring excerpts from the Lisson Gallery conversation on 18 June 2020, between John Akomfrah, Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, is now screening across the websites of three institutions. A gut punch, a call to action, and a reckoning with complicity, the video animates words by Campt and Hartman, and crackles with a soundtrack by UK producer and DJ Caspa. Juxtaposing music, colour and text, Cokes has excerpted quotes on complicity, mobilisation and empathy, ending with the line: “We have witnessed enough Black death for a lifetime…”

To watch Evil.80.Empathy? (2020) click through to the stream, hosted by the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and ARGOS centre for audio visual arts. Evil.80.Empathy? will be available on each institution’s website from Monday, 13 July – Sunday, 26 July.

Goldsmiths and Carpenter Center presented volumes 1 and 2 of Cokes’s solo show If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late between September and March. ARGOS will open volume 3 in September.