Mixing Plant

In the funnel level of the mixing plant at Zeche Zollverein, Urbane Künste Ruhr is showing the installation Mixing Plant by US artist Tony Cokes. A total of eleven video works are spread across the brutalist space, complemented by a central monitor wall. Monochrome colour surfaces combined with text are the defining visual theme. The text animations are taken from advertising, music videos, news, theoretical texts, self-conducted interviews or Hollywood cinema. Cokes detaches the text from its original context and, by means of montage and collage, places it in new contexts of meaning. The soundtrack, which contributes further content in the form of music and sounds, is of decisive importance.

The works on display span a period from 1999 to 2019. The latest work, selected.ruhr.sound.scenes (2019), is based on conversations the artist held on site with music makers from the Ruhr region. From the statements of historians, producers and a technician for sound systems, he has extracted a text that describes snapshots of past and present music scenes in the region. He juxtaposes them with archival industrial sound. In this way, their narratives connect acoustically with the environment that shaped them. Cokes sees pop music as a culture shaped by society, which - like cinema, for example - always reports on the local and global production conditions under which it was created.

A project by Urbane Künste Ruhr for the Ruhrtriennale