Mark Leckey

Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) is a Turner Prize winning artist from the North West of Britain known for engaging with youth subculture (especially music), pop culture, and media history through his uniquely enchanted (or perhaps haunted) and highly biographical lens as an outsider growing up in a fading working-class town. His work takes multifarious forms – video, sound, sculpture, performance, and image, often in combination – summoning an atmosphere that pervades the exhibition space: a palimpsest of place and of time, inhabited by talismanic objects and undead mediatised memories. His video work especially invokes and informs these spectral dimensions, often employing montage of found footage scavenged from the vast archives of YouTube, as with his breakthrough video artwork Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), composed of clips from UK’s underground rave scene, and further built upon with sculptural and animated interventions in the multi-generation spanning Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD (2015) – a self-described “exorcism”.

Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD is a 23-minute diachronic eclipse of sound, image, and sensibility starting with the year of the artist’s birth and culminating in the Time to Totality with collective visions at the turn of the millennium (also featuring seminal Liverpool performances by the Beatles and Joy Division). The work’s propulsion generates the sense that time is imploding, probing the consistency of self and memory through British culture and the media’s evolution from radio, television, and film to the internet. Simultaneously highly personal and generic, the work is an archaeological genealogy of the artist that coalesces into an enigmatic map. It also serves as an emblematic entry point into Leckey’s oeuvre, exploring of the power of images within an uncannily animated universe.