Whitney Biennial 2022:  Quiet as It’s Kept

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Tony Cokes’s video installations employ the style and pacing reminiscent of PowerPoint presentations and the slide-tape performances that were common in audiovisual works from the 1970s to the 1990s. For the Biennial, he made videos about police violence and the pandemic featuring the words of the Sex Pistols’ lead singer John Lydon, theorist Judith Butler, U.S. civil rights hero and statesman John Lewis, and Elijah McClain, a twenty-three-year-old Black man who died after being placed in a chokehold by police in 2019. Cokes’s works often feature a soundtrack that acts as a counterpoint to the visual material being presented. This presentation includes music by the Notwist, Deadbeat, Manic Street Preachers, and Joy Division. As Cokes has put it, his works are “all about America in one way or another.”