The work of the American artist Tony Cokes is part of a long tradition of working with moving images that uses the relationship between words, writing and their respective reading mechanisms as elements that shape cinema objects. It's a trend that runs through the 20th century art, starting with the avant-garde kinetic experiments of the 1920s (found, for example, in the films of Duchamp or Man Ray), through Situationist cinema, postmodern experimentalism in the work of artists such as Michael Snow, to the "last breath" of some of the most influential artists of our time, such as Jean-Luc Godard.

So what makes Cokes' work unique in the context of this production, which formally combines the art of cinema with that of the written and often literary word? The answer lies in the composite body of his creations, which combine academic, philosophical, journalistic or popular culture texts with unmistakable visual and sound qualities.

Tony Cokes navigates between filmmaker, broadcaster, DJ and researcher. Perhaps that's why the label 'media artist' fits him so well. His films and installations propose a unique visual and sonic semantics, anchored in messages that open the door to thinking about political and historical issues of different periods, examining the hypermediated value of the word that intercepts us in digital media, thus questioning the commodification of information and its distribution and reception channels. In his new work, developed for Batalha Centro de Cinema (Testament E), we read, quoting Deleuze, that 'communication is a command'.

Capitalism, racialisation, coloniality and other oppressive systems of power are some of the present and circular themes of his films — textual, colourful, clear and frontal — which enlighten us with chromatic, typographic, but also musical poignancy.

His films are invariably populated by recognisable techno, house and pop themes, including Derrick May, Kraftwerk, New Order and Britney Spears. The sound and, even more so, the thought of music are the pillars of his work, as celebratory gestures of musical heritage and, above all, as characters that illustrate history and complexify his narratives through surprising and provocative collage games. Some of the films directly address the role of music in processes of political reconstruction, expanding the possibilities of cultural confluences and of reading events. In Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?, which we present in Foyer 2, we see a proposal that crosses the history of European minimal techno, the African American roots of Detroit house and Paul Gilroy's seminal text The Black Atlantic. At the beginning of the film we read: 'Techno is the meeting between George Clinton and Kraftwerk in a lift' (Derrick May).

As a whole, Cokes' work almost always pushes us to the precipice of the "progress of history" and its forgotten victims (as Walter Benjamin noted, and as important contemporary black thinkers such as Gilroy and Christina Sharpe do), composing acts of protest, revision, remembrance and also reparation for past events. And so he was rightly described in this year's award and grant from the prestigious McArthur Foundation as a 'unique artist' whose work 'has the power to bring clarity and tone to our perception of historical events, their people and their narratives'.

We present some of his most striking and representative works, which follow the artist's journey, in several venues of Batalha Centro de Cinema. We have included one of his earliest films, directed at the end of the 1980s, Black Celebration (a documentary and archival film based on the writings of Guy Debord to address demonstrations by black communities in various parts of the USA in the 1960s), as well as various installations from the last two decades that define his semiology and in which we encounter the thinking of figures such as Mark Fisher, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler and Kodwo Eshun. And we present Testament E, the new work that gives the exhibition its name, in which the artist returns to Fisher's word. Based on a lecture given by the British philosopher in Zagreb ten years ago, Cokes offers us a guide — also musical — for thinking about the twists and turns of history, the malaise of the present and the ghosts that come back to haunt us and cloud our vision of the future.