Tony Cokes in conversation with Peter Saville

Tony Cokes in Conversation with Peter Saville presents a compelling dialogue between the American visual artist and the legendary graphic designer, taking place against the backdrop of 4 Voices / 4 Weeks—Cokes’s bold commission for Piccadilly Lights. The conversation brings together Cokes’s text-based visual language and Saville’s graphic legacy into a shared interrogation of visual culture and public memory.

Rather than offering fixed conclusions, Cokes and Saville open a reflective space exploring how graphic form and textual layering can provoke political awareness. Cokes’s use of mnemonic codes—dropping vowels, abbreviating statements—transforms urgent declarations into visual puzzles that demand attention and interpretation. Saville, whose design practice has shaped pop culture iconography since the Factory Records era, engages with how these strategies function within a broader legacy of visual disruption.

This conversation situates art not just as reflection but as disruption—where design, text, and collective memory collide to unsettle complacency. It’s an eloquent exploration of resistance: how form becomes meaning and how visual abstraction can catalyze ethical engagement in a fragmented public sphere.