After The Future (SM BNGRZ Rework 2)
May 15–June 15, 2023
Mersey Road Off Aigburth Road
Liverpool L17 6AG
UK
Further Down the Line is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition After The Future (SM BNGRZ Rework 2) by US-based artist Tony Cokes.
Further Down the Line is a new contemporary visual arts space and exhibition programme in Liverpool, UK, founded by Curator and writer Adam Carr. Taking place in Aigburth railway station, Further Down the Line’s exhibitions are presented in a display case housed in the station’s waiting room, which features Merseyrail’s yellow signature colour. It is open to the public 7 days a week during exhibitions.
Tony Cokes’s exhibition, After The Future (SM BNGRZ Rework 2), consists of a new work of the same name. It is taken from SM BNGRZ (2021), a video piece outlining the meaning, ambitions and dreams concerning (queer) club culture in post-pandemic times, based, in part, on Rainald Goetz’s book Rave. Presented in both a new format and context, the new piece offers further contemplation of and a renewed outlook on concepts of language, aesthetics, and time.
The exhibition extends Cokes’s practice, which, for more than three decades, has explored media and pop culture, and investigated how both are containers for political ideologies which form, shape and impact upon communities. A longstanding thread of enquiry has been aspects of race and identity, often using video incorporating found imagery, text, and seemingly unrelated colour slides. His work has covered an array of sources as diverse as Public Enemy, William Burroughs, Morrisey, Drake, and Édouard Glissant.
The exhibition After The Future (SM BNGRZ Rework 2) is kindly supported by Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Austria. In kind support for Further Down the Line and its exhibition programme comes from Merseyrail. Liverpool John Moores University, where Adam Carr is Reader of Curating and Contemporary Art, provides additional funding.
About Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes (b. 1966, Richmond, VA) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.
Further on Further Down the Line
Founded by Curator and writer Adam Carr, Further Down the Line’s programme presents 6 solo exhibitions annually of international artists, travelling in, in its first year, from destinations as far as Afghanistan, Denmark, Canada and United States. Future exhibitions are by Cynthia Talmadge (July-August), Hangama Amiri (September-October) and SoiL Thornton (November-December).
Further Down the Line identifies with a lineage of unorthodox exhibition practices that have sought to place contemporary art in closer contact with a public, including at Skulptur Projekte Münster, Münster, founded by Kasper König (1977-); Places with a Past: New Site-specific Art in Charleston, the Spoleto Festival, South Carolina, curated by Mary Jane Jacob (1991); and The Wrong Gallery, New York, by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick (2002–2005), among many others.
A non-for-profit space, Further Down the Line is for artistic, curatorial, and educational innovation. It aims to contribute to critical discourses of contemporary visual art and encourages intercultural and cross-generational dialogues by generating space for presentation, reflection, discussion, and exchange.
A graphic identity, running over its website, signage, and related activity, uses the Rail Alphabet, a typeface designed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir in the 1960s for signage on the British Rail.
