Conversation with Peter Saville and Tony Cokes I Tremulations Closing Celebration
EVENT: Conversation with Peter Saville and Tony Cokes I Tremulations Closing Celebration
DATE: 23rd June 2023
TIME: Friday 23rd June - 6pm-9pm (conversation 6pm-7pm)
VENUE: Swedenborg Hall
ARTIST/S: Peter Saville, Tony Cokes, Mark Leckey, Hilma af Klint, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
CURATOR/S: Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies
SPEAKER/S: Peter Saville, Tony Cokes, Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies
Peter Saville’s sleeve designs for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) and New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983). Sourced from petersaville.info; © the artist and Factory Records.
Peter Saville is responsible for some of the most recognizable album sleeves in the history of British music, especially through his involvement with Factory Records. Saville designed the cover art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980); numerous records by OMD, including their self-titled debut Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (1980); many releases by New Order, including Movement (1981), Blue Monday (1983) and Power, Corruption & Lies (1983); Roxy Music’s Flesh + Blood (1980) and Avalon (1982); Suede’s Coming Up (1996), and Pulp’s This Is Hardcore (1998). Saville’s work, however, extends beyond his musical legacy: in 2004 he was Creative Director for the city of Manchester, and he has designed everything from tapestries to a Metrolink rebrand.
Stills from Tony Cokes, Testament A: MF FKA K-P X KE RIP 2019 (35 mins 22 seconds), 2019. Courtesy of the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Tony Cokes is a celebrated American visual artist and educator. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Long Beach Museum of Art. In his work Testament A: MF FKA K-P X KE RIP 2019 (2019, 35 mins 22 seconds), which is now installed for the third chapter of Tremulations, Cokes renders the artist and writer Kodwo Eshun’s 2018 memorial lecture for the critic and theorist Mark Fisher in video format, with a soundtrack ranging from Burial’s ‘Exit Woundz’ to Japan’s ‘Ghosts’. The resulting work is at once an address and an affective exercise in hauntology; a prompt to politically and personally reflect.