Conversation

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Greene Naftali present a conversation between media artist Tony Cokes, philosopher Christoph Cox, and curator Sohrab Mohebbi. Organized in conjunction with Cokes’s debut solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, On Non-Visibility, the conversation addresses the exhibition’s titular theme, its place as a central concern in Cokes’s thirty-plus-year-long practice, and the ways in which Cokes’s videos address and subvert popular rhetorics of power.

Participants
Tony Cokes: Artist, Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Christoph Cox: Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College
Sohrab Mohebbi: Curator, SculptureCenter

Tony Cokes is a media artist who lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His first exhibition at Greene Naftali, On Non-Visibility, is on view from April 27–June, 9, 2018. Recent exhibitions include at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; REDCAT, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pera Museum, Istanbul; and the Louvre, Paris.

Christoph Cox is a philosopher, critic, and curator of visual and sonic art. He is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College, where he teaches contemporary European philosophy and art theory. Cox is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999), and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (CCS/Sternberg, 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Bloomsbury, 2017). The recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Wire, Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, The Review of Metaphysics, and elsewhere. Cox has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, New Langton Arts, and G Fine Art Gallery, the Brick & Mortar International Video Art Festival, and elsewhere. He has written catalog essays for exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Mass MoCA, Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and other venues.

Sohrab Mohebbi is a curator at SculptureCenter. Previously associate curator at REDCAT, Los Angeles, Mohebbi organized exhibitions by artists including John Knight, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Falke Pisano, and Tony Cokes. Mohebbi has also worked in curatorial departments at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Queens Museum, and for he Los Angeles Poverty Department Theater group. As a writer, Mohebbi has contributed to exhibition catalogues as well as publications including Frieze and Artforum, and received a grant from the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.