Tony Cokes, 4 Voices/4 Weeks

American visual artist Tony Cokes will broadcast four powerful new films confronting police violence and the questions we face in the post-pandemic era, capitalizing on the Piccadilly Lights screen to put on the largest public display of Cokes’ distinctive colour and text compositions.

‘4 Voices / 4 Weeks’ presents Cokes’ translation of words by John Lydon, Judith Butler, US civil rights hero John Lewis and Elijah McClain, a 23-year old African American man who died after being put in a chokehold by police in 2019. The works move from punk provocation to peaceful self-sacrifice, recalling McClain’s final words and expounding our deep responsibilities in the wake of violence against the vulnerable. Across four parts, Cokes’ 4 Voices emerge from contraposed positions but describe an arc and array of crucial realities we face today: mourning mass death, reclaiming the power of public gathering, and continuing the struggle for racial and social equality.

Cokes is the author of politically resonant works that appropriate and reframe diverse texts to challenge narratives in media produced under late capitalism. He is acclaimed for urgent and piercing critical works that bring together colour theory, his signature systems of coded text, and audio, which includes music in his new works for CIRCA from Manic Street Preachers, The Notwist, Joy Division and Deadbeat (Canadian musician Scott Monteith/BLKRTZ).

For CIRCA, Cokes translates texts into a code he devised and which often features in his work, filtering direct statements through a coding process made up of simple abbreviations and symbols. This approach produces striking and unsettling graphics for the Piccadilly Screen and pushes against the expected hyper-legibility of such a large public display.

Tony Cokes is a pioneering American artist whose work explores the relationship between language, power, politics and popular culture. For more than four decades, he has developed a distinctive practice that combines text, colour, sound and moving image to examine how ideology is produced, circulated and absorbed through contemporary media. Working across film, installation and public space, Cokes transforms reading into an active experience, inviting audiences to question the systems that shape perception, memory and collective understanding.

Since the 1980s, Cokes has created a unique visual language built from appropriated texts, music, historical documents and cultural references. Drawing on sources that range from critical theory and political speeches to punk lyrics and popular music, his works reveal the hidden structures underpinning race, identity, capitalism and mass communication. Characterised by bold fields of colour and carefully choreographed text, his practice rejects conventional image-making in favour of a form of visual thinking that is at once analytical, poetic and politically charged.

In 2021, Cokes collaborated with CIRCA on 4 Voices / 4 Weeks, a landmark public commission that transformed London’s Piccadilly Lights into a platform for critical reflection. Across four chapters, the artist brought together the words of John Lydon, John Lewis, Elijah McClain and Judith Butler, tracing an emotional and political journey through anger, resistance, grief and collective responsibility. Presented at a moment shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed global demands for racial and social justice, the commission demonstrated Cokes’ unique ability to transform language, colour and sound into urgent acts of public engagement. The project was later exhibited as part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, extending its reach from one of the world’s most visible public screens into one of contemporary art’s most significant international exhibitions.

Cokes has been the subject of major exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the New Museum, MACBA, Haus der Kunst and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Through a practice that remains as urgent as it is formally innovative, he continues to challenge how culture is consumed, how histories are constructed and how public consciousness is shaped in the twenty-first century.