4 Voices / 4 Weeks: Tony Cokes in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

As 4 Voices / 4 Weeks unfolds across Piccadilly Lights throughout February 2021, Hans Ulrich Obrist joins Tony Cokes in conversation to explore the ideas shaping this ambitious new commission for CIRCA. Structured as four distinct works presented over four consecutive weeks, the project transforms one of London’s most visible public spaces into a site for reflection on anger, solidarity, memory and cultural change.

Their discussion moves through the foundations of Cokes’ practice, tracing his long-standing interest in the relationship between text, music and political meaning. Drawing on punk, popular culture and subcultural forms of communication, Cokes reflects on how sound and language can generate new forms of public engagement, creating productive tensions between pleasure, critique and collective experience.

At a moment when public gathering itself has become increasingly fragile, 4 Voices / 4 Weeks proposes another way of being together. Through coded messages, repetition and the shared rhythms of music, Cokes invites audiences to pause, reflect and consider how art might continue to function as a space for connection, dissent and possibility in the heart of the city.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Thank you so much, Tony, for accepting to do this conversation. It’s great to see you again and to continue this ongoing conversation with you, which we started about two years ago.

Before we talk about what we’re going to do with Piccadilly, I want to go back a little to the beginning, because, of course, what you do has to do with text, music and cultural context. You once told me that you want to offer a rich set of relationships between the text, the music and the cultural context. In that sense, your work allows people new ways of thinking about commonplace things and gives ideas, as you said, an effective charge and a linkage to the body.

That’s something people in London are soon going to experience at Piccadilly with your work. I just wanted to find out how you came to this practice, how you arrived at creating this extraordinary relationship between text, music and cultural context. As we spoke about earlier, you started out initially as a sculptor. Can you tell us a little bit about how all of this happened, and whether there was a particular epiphany?

Tony Cokes: You know, I wouldn’t say it was an epiphany. It was more a long series of processes.

My education was kind of varied and weird. I really didn’t think of myself as an artist, at least when I started college, but I was involved in creative practices and thinking about them, and I kind of moved from one place to another. I started out in a traditional film and television programme and found that that was not really what I ultimately wanted to do.

I knew some artists when I was in school, and I thought, well, maybe there are some possibilities, some modes of practice. I was generally interested in creative cultures, but, as I said, I didn’t really consider that it would be something I would wind up doing.

Then I started doing still photography, and I always wanted to incorporate writing, although that seemed to be a problem or an issue. For me, looking at it through a kind of mediatic lens, considering what was available at the time, it just seemed logical to want to combine different modes of practice, different contexts for practice and different audiences for practice. It seemed like these things were commonplace throughout the culture.

I even took a course that tried to examine visual art and its activities in relation to advertising, documentary practices and other forms beyond fine art. The idea was that photography, in particular, didn’t really privilege fine art. It was simply one of many things that one could do. I became really interested in that.

Of course, I also became interested in the ways in which texts often inflect our viewpoint on imagery, and in ideas about context and audience, and how those things inform the ways in which elements relate to one another. There were different combinations and proportions of those elements, and those were really exciting ideas for me.

I then took a long detour through a multiplicity of practices to arrive where I eventually wound up, which was, at least at that time, in sculpture. Sculpture seemed to be the most accommodating area at the place where I went to school. Other people were interested in my ideas, but it was always, “Yes, but you’ll need to produce a particular class of object.” At the time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to doing that. I was much more interested in the spaces in between, or the folds between different modalities, rather than identifying with a single medium.

Later, that came to an interesting conclusion because, a little over a decade ago, people would ask me, “What’s your relationship to video?” In some ways, video allowed me to process and foreground different elements that I was interested in, but I wasn’t really interested in video per se. I guess that’s partly a hangover, or perhaps a reaction to, my education, where people still seemed obsessed with what medium something belonged to.

I was more interested in the possibilities and potential confusions of what a work might be. I think that, to some extent, informs my interest in the ability of media to function for, and perhaps even produce, publics and audiences. People may not need to know anything about art or the art world in order to encounter the work, or at least that’s the way I approach it.

We’ll see, in the case of Piccadilly, how it reads.

HUO: It brings us, then, to Piccadilly, because, as we speak in January 2021, you are working on this project, 4 Voices / 4 Weeks. It consists of four video commissions, and the work will change throughout the month of February, with a different work each week.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you structured this project? Of course, there are many possible ways to structure a month, whether in terms of days or weeks. For example, Cauleen Smith approached her commission on a daily basis, using handwritten notes and texts within the films and working with a different rhythm.

With your project, however, it has to do with the rhythm of the week. These four video works, each shown for one week, will also be screened digitally on the CIRCA platform, where each week you will, in a sense, speak with a different voice and create additional content.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you structured the month?

TC: Yeah, I mean, for me, I guess I was aware that people were working in a daily modality, and I thought, well, I could do something like that, but the way I work, I tend to work through things relatively slowly, even though this project was probably done from start to finish in maybe three months.

I thought, well, how else could one divide the time? I liked the simplicity of setting it up in weekly instalments. Obviously, there will be other things on the website, previous works, sketches for the works, but I liked the idea that repetition might be an interesting possibility, especially given the relative brevity of the pieces. I think each one is about two and a half minutes, and I thought it might be interesting to have multiple scales operating within that.

I felt it would give people multiple opportunities to encounter the work, or to commit to it as a period of time in a social space, as opposed to having different content every day. I like to work with repetition and with already existing structures, so it was almost a case of thinking, okay, a lot of people have taken a daily approach, so I think I’ll take a weekly approach.

There was also an interesting symmetry to it. February happens to have four weeks, so it seemed interesting to do a different work each week and to think about the relationships between the four pieces across a different timescale than the daily.

It’s funny, but for me it would probably be easier to think in terms of a weekly structure than doing something every day. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I know some people who thrive within that kind of structural discipline, and it’s really interesting, but for me I went back to the repertoire of things I’d already been thinking about and asked myself how I could establish a relationship and a structure to work through.

I had a number of questions and issues in mind, along with different ways of constituting a relationship between text and music in each piece. I thought, these are four ideas that I’ve been thinking about, and there are relationships between them, so would it be interesting to lay them out in a particular pattern, with both known and unknown differences and correspondences between them?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Tony, I wanted to ask you about ANGER IS AN ENERGY and what prompted the decision to produce a work based on that phrase.

I was also curious about its connection to the most recent work you’ve shown in London, in your exhibition at Goldsmiths, which was a survey that included new work, such as The Declarative Mode, based on a lecture by Kodwo Eshun about Mark Fisher, and also a piece called The Morrissey Problem, which, as you said, addressed questions of nationalism in recent statements.

Of course, we can find similar kinds of statements in the work and public comments of John Lydon, so I was wondering whether there is a connection between ANGER IS AN ENERGY and your previous film The Morrissey Problem.

TC: Let me start with how the piece began. I’ve often said in talks that I make work out of things that really bother me, or things that intrigue me and have an ongoing, sustaining value.

About a year ago, I gave a talk in Manchester at the Whitworth, and afterwards a young woman, I believe a student, asked a question about the relationship between anger and my practice. That actually started me thinking about different ideas and models. Somehow, I think, the song Rise by Public Image Ltd came to mind, because it literally uses that phrase as part of the chorus.

I thought, well, to some extent that’s true for me, but at the same time I was also very aware of this growing turn towards nationalism. So I thought it might be interesting to take up John Lydon’s description of his influences and the circumstances that led to the production of that particular song, but also with an eye to the ways in which one could say that those desires for change, which I think were encoded in punk and post-punk, have now become rallying cries for what I would consider undesirable nationalism, rampant capitalism, or any number of other things.

So, in a sense, I went from thinking, yes, that’s part of my ethos, my way of thinking and my own personal history, to recognising that these things have had much more complicated repercussions and results. Yet, at the same time, I thought it was interesting to look back on that, to contextualise it with other things and to juxtapose it with the other works in this series.

It was an interesting point of departure because, on the one hand, it figures questions of origin and influence, but on the other hand, it is much more complicated. I’m glad you brought up The Morrissey Problem, because in some ways the same relationship applies there. People have taken positions that are very different from where they perhaps began, and it’s interesting to think about the ways in which certain popular music discourses have started to figure within explicit political discourse.

A minor subset of this is something I’ve been thinking about in other projects, namely the use of popular music in political campaigns. I think, in a broad sense, some campaigns want to position themselves as optimistic, culturally inclusive and open. It’s interesting to notice that others position themselves as deeply conflicted and, in some cases, even opposed to togetherness. Even as they use popular music, they seem to embody a kind of isolationism in their desires and intentions.

Maybe at some point I’ll do a work explicitly about that. In relation to another project I’m working on right now, it’s become a way of thinking through questions of lies and liars in popular music. I’ve juxtaposed an article about the failure of perception on the part of the Trump administration regarding COVID with songs about lies and liars.

That led me to look at things like playlists used by the Trump campaign and to think that perhaps there’s something there as well. These particular selections of popular music can be contrasted with other selections one might make, which would articulate a very different view of society.

HUO: Yeah, that’s why I think this quote by Etel Adnan is so great: “The world needs togetherness, not separation; love, not suspicion; a common future, not isolation.”

I wanted to ask you about the relationship between text and music, between reading, hearing and listening. In your conversation with Kodwo Eshun, Kodwo talks about this idea of your engaging with listening in the mode of looking, in the key of reading, and reading in the mode of watching, in the key of hearing.

So I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about how that works in relation to the CIRCA piece, and also how you work through questions of affective harmony or dissonance.

TC: Yeah, I think, for me, sound is almost a kind of compositional device. I use patterns such as refrain, chorus, verse, chorus as one template, knowing that it will be exceeded and complicated by the verbal aspects of the pieces.

I often try to create a gap, or perhaps multiple gaps, between the sound material and the text. I often, though not always, choose music from a different time period than the text, mainly because I think there are certain historical and cultural problematics that are constantly being worked through in popular forms. People often assume that music only offers pleasure, but I think there are always other things that can be made legible in a certain way.

In my case, I seek to juxtapose things in a way that brings them into tension, sometimes even contradiction. Sometimes there is a differential emotion or subject matter that rubs against or complicates the text. I tend to work with fairly serious textual subjects, and I think the intensification and release that you find in a pop song can contradict that or engage the body in a particular way.

People often ask, “Should I be tapping my foot to this?” or “Can I dance to this?” I think that’s an interesting question to provoke through the juxtaposition of music and language. I think there’s a productivity in that interference that is useful. I try not to over-specify things, but instead to locate areas where complication and friction might emerge, because I think that can be useful for viewers, allowing for different readings of the texts, different kinds of relationships and different forms of attention through the act of juxtaposition.

I’ve said from time to time that what I consider a quintessentially modern experience is reading something while listening to music and, at the same time, watching a landscape. I try to take that as an approach to the materials.

I also feel that, on a certain level, if people experience too much interference or complication, the texts already exist and aren’t difficult to locate. I usually cite the sources at the end of each piece, so if someone really wants to know exactly what a text says, they can find it.

Of course, there’s an additional complication in the pieces I made for CIRCA, because I actually encoded the texts. That introduces another layer of distance, but perhaps also a strange kind of intentionality and intensity, because you’re not only reading the text, you’re also having to decode it.

I think we can talk about this more later, but in some instances it worked better than in others. One of the texts originally wasn’t encoded, and when I encoded it and looked at it, it became difficult even for me to identify the original reference. I thought, well, maybe this is too extreme. But with the others, perhaps because the vocabulary was different and less specific, they were actually easier to make out.

I like the idea of using a large-scale, very public space to deliver what you could call a coded message, in the way that subcultures exist and reuse elements of popular culture to make statements or comment on the complexity of their position and identity within culture. Those were the kinds of things I was thinking about for the project.

HUO: I also wanted to ask you about the sound, the sonic component. You’ve chosen music by The Notwist, an indie rock band founded in 1989. That was, of course, the year the Fall of the Berlin Wall took place, the year GPS technology became publicly available, and also the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

I recently had a conversation with Tim in which we spoke not only about his invention of the web, but also about his concerns that net neutrality is in danger. The original idea, as he famously said, was that “this is for everyone”. He’s worried that we are moving towards a two-tier system, with faster internet for those who can pay and slower access for those who cannot, so he’s really engaged in a renewed campaign to defend net neutrality.

Anyway, all of this brings us back to 1989, which is also the year that the Acher brothers and Martin Gretschmann founded The Notwist in the small town of Weilheim in Upper Bavaria. It was only in 1990 that they recorded their debut album, which was very much rooted in grunge and metal, and then in 1992 they released Nook, which one might describe as a more indie-oriented record.

We spoke about this in our previous interview, about your interest in this Bavarian group, The Notwist, so I wanted to ask you more generally: what interests you about The Notwist, and what prompted you to bring their music into the Piccadilly project?

TC: Yeah, I have a long-standing interest in their music. I was introduced to their work, not at the beginning but somewhere in the middle of their career, by a friend and former student who knew their music. I think he gave me one of their later albums, Shrink, from, I believe, 1998.

I have to admit, it caused a kind of brainwave and upheaval for me. It was one of those uncanny experiences where you think, Why have I never heard this before? What was it that I thought I knew before listening to this that I now realise I’d been missing for a very long time?

I was interested in a number of different things. On Shrink, especially, they move through different genres, sometimes even within a single song, or from one song to the next, in ways that really interested me. There were horn arrangements, jazz elements, electronic bleeps, songs that felt more like indie rock, and moments of noise music. I think it was the range of both affects and techniques that initially intrigued me.

I remember thinking, Wow, I don’t know anybody, or at least I couldn’t think of anybody at the time, who worked across such a broad range of musical forms within a particular group setting. I think that lack of an overarching genre really appealed to me. It probably says something about my own practice and my broad interests in music and other things.

I was also interested in their history. They worked in a small town, yet started out in a post-punk, hardcore, grunge context, and then ten years later they were doing something that one wouldn’t necessarily connect to that point of origin. That intrigued me as well.

I met them in the summer of 2000 because I decided that I wanted to ask if I could use their music in a project, and I did. The project itself is still, in some ways, in tatters, but some of the works eventually became the first pieces in my Evilseries. As that series developed, they returned as a kind of musical accompaniment to different episodes within it.

I’ve been in dialogue with Markus Acher for pretty much twenty years, and it’s interesting to think about their location, their practice, and the changes that have taken place in the world. I don’t know whether we would have been in conversation, or even had the opportunity to meet, were it not for the internet. These are strange things that happen. Someone who is interested in something talks to a friend, and the friend says, “Oh yes, write to him. I think he might be interested in talking to you,” and suddenly a working and intellectual relationship begins.

Because I knew their origins in post-punk, grunge and elements of metal, I thought it might be interesting to take one of their more contemporary songs. Casino is, I think, from 2014. I often look at things in oblique ways, or somewhat allegorically, and I think Casino can be read as an allegory for their position as musicians within a particular, highly categorised music marketplace, and for the desire to get through the day and continue functioning within a context that may work against some of your guiding principles.

I thought it might be an interesting way, after evoking one song, to respond with something from a different time, a different genre and a different location. That’s really the way I thought about it.

I can’t quite remember the rest of your question, but I think that’s also part of it.

HUO: No, I think that answers it very well already, because it was really just about The Notwist. Maybe you could say a little bit more about why The Notwist felt right for Piccadilly, and about the connection to John Lydon.

I’m not sure you need to go into great detail, because you’ve already explained it, but perhaps you could add a little more on that.

TC: I mean, I know that they have fans in the UK. I know that they’ve probably played there more often than they have in the US, which is another factor.

In some ways, I thought it was an interesting place from which to begin a discourse about where things are today, and about that strange conundrum between anger, the desire for peaceful ways of addressing cultural change, and the horrific incidents that continue to happen. I wanted to think about what those things mean on a larger, more public scale.

It seemed like an interesting point of departure, something that doesn’t necessarily appear to be about those issues in any direct way, but which, through juxtaposition, might constitute a meaningful and useful glimpse into that series of relationships that I think we’re constantly dealing with, especially these days.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Tony, you’re interested in the question of whether anger is being posited as the only avenue to change.

Last week, I had a long conversation with Honey Dijon, and we talked about many different things. In relation to your work, it was interesting to discuss this idea of a tradition of bricolage, of bringing things together, of creating a kind of harmonic chaos in order to produce something new.

We also spoke a great deal about love, and about music as a form of healing. It would be wonderful to hear a little bit about that from your perspective.

TC: Okay. I think music does bring people into relation with one another in an interesting way, one that may not be possible through discourse alone, and that possibility really interests me. I think it is a way of engaging people.

It’s interesting, I think Jacques Attali says something to the effect that music is a way of processing violence, and that it does so in ways that make it possible to create a social space that is not always, strictly speaking, about competition for the same things. It rehearses a series of possibilities for ways of being in the world with others, whether through playing in ensembles or listening to music collectively. Those are often very restorative and useful possibilities that may reduce our desire to be constantly confronting one another.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and I don’t know if it’s directly related to what you’re asking, is that music creates a space for people to be together. At least for my friends who think about music as a cultural force, that’s something that is in very short supply today. Many people are concerned about the lack of time and contact with others.

I’ve had a lot of reports and feedback about people dancing in my exhibitions, and you wonder, why would that be? In part, it’s because clubs are closed. You go to a place that’s supposed to be about visual and media art, but music is present, and therefore a different kind of address becomes possible through that alone.

More broadly, I think music can bring people into affective resonance and move them away from other forms of relation and conflict. Not that it’s a panacea, because nothing is, but it is a way of processing great traumas and functioning in the world on a daily basis. That’s important to me.

As for the address in the work for Piccadilly, I think it changes across the four films. Lydon’s text in the first piece is positioned in a very particular way. He’s basically describing his own practice and his reactions to specific historical and contextual circumstances surrounding the making of a song. There’s a single voice in the music as well, articulating a story.

After that, things become a little more complicated in terms of who is speaking and in what voice. I immediately wanted to complicate that in the second piece, which features two related narrations by John Lewis. I wanted to move away from the individual who may be angry or trying to analyse the social and cultural situation in which they find themselves, towards something that is both more historical and, strangely, more contemporary. It also has an explicit stake in society as part of what it seeks to articulate.

It was almost an accident. I had been thinking about working with Lewis’s texts and was intrigued by the idea of writing something intended for publication after one’s death, making that circumstance part of the context in which the text is read. I then juxtaposed that with an earlier text that looks back retrospectively. So he’s thinking about his life in what is almost a final register, while another text moves backwards in time. The excerpt I chose, meanwhile, is specifically about his response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and there’s a sense that, at the end of his life, he sees something that resonates with everything his life had been leading towards.

There’s a stronger desire for continuity and connection in the second piece, and then I double and complicate that through the soundtrack. I had been wondering what music to use with the Lewis texts when I happened to receive an email announcement from a friend whose music I’d used before. The piece itself quoted John Lewis, and I thought, How did he know I was already thinking about John Lewis?

Normally, I would try to create a greater distance between the music and the text, but this seemed to make sense. The music was still from a different time and a different place, yet the connection felt meaningful. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before.

The questions of love, family and one’s relationship to society are all present in that musical track. So the second piece perhaps becomes more generous and more porous. It’s less about an individual working in isolation and more about individuals seeking to activate relationships with others.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In one of your texts, you say, “I’m not trying to make a rational argument. I’m attempting to set up a series of relations.” You also compare your role as an artist to that of an editor.

Could you talk a little bit about that idea of the artist as an editor?

TC: I think, in terms of historical and theoretical references, I see it in relation to a couple of things. It’s almost as though each text contains multiple possible readings, and I’m simply looking for readings that resonate with me, in the hope that they might register in different ways for others.

I’ve probably said in a similar context that I don’t see myself as a traditional author. Writing is relatively difficult for me, but seeing possibilities in fragments of other texts is something that comes more naturally, something I feel I can do relatively easily.

When I started working with archival images, it was always a question of trying to find a space for a reading that aligned with my own desires. Those desires were not always directly connected to what might be considered central to the material itself. Sometimes I was looking for marginal elements, things that referred to the questions that interested me. I think that, to some extent, informs my approach to texts as well.

I’m looking for fragments, and for juxtapositions of fragments, that bring certain questions into relief. It’s not necessarily a matter of taking an entire text, although sometimes I do try to take all of something and code it, or add elements to it in ways that make it speak differently, or more fragmentarily. More often, I’m taking pieces and arranging them in ways that are productive, first of all for me, and then, hopefully, resonant for others.

Rather than beginning with a fixed idea of what something should mean, I tend to work with methods, or filters, if you will. I’m more interested in what happens as things are processed than in knowing, before I begin, exactly what the outcome will be. That said, I do use structural methods to arrive at those possibilities.

I think there is a way in which the choices one makes can be productive, as opposed to believing that one must always be entirely original. When I was a student, I began to question whether originality was really necessary in order for something to have resonance, legibility or weight. It seemed to me that it might be possible to take fragments and juxtapose them with other elements in such a way that they produce new effects, even if the materials themselves are not new.

HUO: Tony, I wanted to ask you about your unrealised projects because, as you know, I’m very interested in this idea. We know very little, ultimately, about artists’ unrealised projects.

We know a great deal about unrealised architectural projects because architects publish them frequently, often through competitions, but most of the time we don’t really know what artists would like to do. Artists are invited to exhibitions and all kinds of projects, but too seldom are they asked what they actually want to realise, or what kinds of work cannot happen within the framework of existing institutions.

I think it’s important to talk about these unrealised projects in order to help make them happen, or at least to facilitate their possible realisation.

The range of unrealised projects is very broad. There are projects that are too big to realise, too small to realise, or simply too expensive. There are utopian projects and projects that are fundamentally unrealisable. There are dreams. There are projects that have simply been forgotten in the studio. I think we all have works that were somehow underway in the past and that we’ve forgotten about.

There are also projects that have been partially realised, as Vito Acconci once pointed out to me. Then there are projects that have been censored. Another category, which Dorothea von Hantelmann mentioned to me, consists of projects that we haven’t dared to do. She described that as a form of self-censorship.

There are many other categories as well, but within this broad spectrum of unrealised projects, I was wondering if you could tell us about one or two that you still hope to realise one day.

TC: Yeah, that’s a difficult question because one of my unrealised projects is something that we actually began talking about together, and I did eventually realise part of it.

I would still like to continue my research into the question of how artists function in society in relation to artistic practice as a kind of social model, and as a motor for so-called innovation and gentrification, and all of those things. In some small part, I started thinking about that through our conversations.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about, and I don’t know if I’ll ever realise it, is a more massive, book-length project. I often work with small fragments, a single article or a short text, but I’ve thought about doing something on a much larger scale. More recently, I’ve begun to think that, in order to keep things manageable, I might do it as a series instead.

One text I’ve been thinking about in that regard, and which I hope to make some progress on, is Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Since we mentioned the Kodwo Eshun text on Mark Fisher, I’ve been thinking a lot about making a work on aspects of capitalist realism. I think it’s an incredibly useful and intriguing book.

I don’t yet know how I would approach it, although I already have some ideas about what the soundtrack might be. How much of the text could be translated into another form, what kind of space it would exist in, and how it might function are all things that I would need to spend a great deal of time figuring out for myself.

When I think about unrealised projects, I often think about things that I would genuinely like to do, but which other people have sometimes advised against. People say, “Oh, don’t do that,” and my response is often, Why not? Even if it fails, what difference does it make? It might still be worth doing, even if the result is unsatisfactory for any number of reasons.

That’s really how I think about unrealised projects. They’re the things I would like to do, but which people tell me are too big, too small, too ambitious, or somehow the wrong scale. Those are the kinds of imaginings that interest me, questions about what a work’s scale is, or should be, or could be.

Part of me wishes I simply had the time to discover just how impractical, utopian or failure-prone some of those ideas might actually be.

HUO: Thank you so much for this amazing interview, Tony. It’s been truly wonderful speaking with you.

TC: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, Virginia) is an American artist whose text-based video works explore the intersections of politics, popular culture, music and history. Combining found texts, colour fields and soundtracks drawn from genres including punk, post-punk and electronic music, Cokes examines questions of race, power, representation and collective memory. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Haus der Kunst and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator, critic and art historian. He is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London and is internationally recognised for his pioneering approach to exhibitions and his extensive programme of interviews with artists, architects, scientists and thinkers. Through projects including The Interview Project and do it, Obrist has explored new forms of collaboration, public engagement and cultural exchange, making him one of the most influential curatorial voices of his generation.