TONY COKES and Oscar Muñoz
Utopia, Dystopia

Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Dec 14, 2024 – June 22, 2025

“Utopia, Dystopia” presents two single-channel videos from the MFA collection by Tony Cokes (b. 1956) and Oscar Muñoz (b. 1951). Created in the last decade, the films grapple with the duality of utopia and dystopia, expressing the artists’ senses of how idealistic visions of society often collide with harsh realities. Utopian dreams can promise a future without oppression and celebrate freedom of expression, yet achieving these ideals frequently comes into conflict with underlying dystopian truths such as systems of control, state surveillance, and deep inequality.

Both artists use language to explore these issues in their work: Muñoz’s Distopía (2014) centers on British author George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, and Cokes’s Untitled (m.j.: the symptom) (2020) borrows text from Mark Fisher’s 2009 essay collection The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson. Although video is an unusual medium for the written word, these two videos brilliantly incorporate the visual treatment of text while exploring knowledge production, political satire, fame, and government control.

For more information, please visit the MFA Boston's website.