Images about images

This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Freitag.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. How else to explain why so much pop music sounds like the past when it might as well sound like the future—and how else to account for the decades of increasingly sophisticated ways of working with that emotion? Born in Birkenhead near Liverpool in 1964, Mark Leckey drew on that feeling throughout the first half of his career.

»I caught the tail end of the post-war consensus,« the artist explains in an episode of the podcast New Models. »I was the first in my family to go to university, but I joined art school to be in a band, and that was the best place to do that. There were the conditions for subculture. There were squats,« he says, and there was financial support for students too. After studying at Newcastle Polytechnic, the young artist was included in ›New Contemporaries‹ in 1989, the annual group show at London’s ICA. It also featured Damien Hirst and others from the generation later dubbed the Young British Artists. But generational labels can be misleading. Leckey has little in common with other British artists born in the early nineteen-sixties, and he didn’t immediately launch a museum or art-fair career. Instead, he took a break from art, moved to North America for a few years and built websites. For almost a decade he hardly made art. Only a few short videos about punk and subculture, spliced together from old TV footage, hinted at what would later interest him. Then, his 1999 video ›Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore‹ became something like a first hit—a belated breakthrough of sorts.

›Fiorucci‹ plays like a dream made of blurred VHS footage of Northern Soul dancers—stuttering, slowed down—and opens with a euphoric synthesiser line. No beat drops; instead the sound becomes a static hiss while dancers spin and dip in a Victorian ballroom. »The shittier the image, the more access it allows,« Leckey says. The dancers are young adults in the 1970s, and they spend their days working in factories. Later, when Leckey collages rave footage, he captures a more recent moment: deindustrialisation has happened, and the factory floors where previous generations worked, have become dance floors. Again and again, a shot from the roof of a housing block—sunset over a bleak industrial landscape—sets a wistful, and, yes, nostalgic mood. But it remains enigmatic. »I grew up in the shadow of Liverpool,« Leckey once said in an interview about province and centre. His work traces links between dance floor and factory floor, between teenage bedroom and archive, between Britain under Margaret Thatcher and its sophisticated subcultures.

Mythic sites of youth

The late 1990s were the last moment when a film like ›Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore‹ could be made the way it has been made, and it took time. Leckey asked friends who worked at TV stations to copy and mail him tapes, which he then digitised and edited on a PC that kept crashing. It was painstaking. More powerful software would have made the process easier a few years later, but the limitless availability of archive material would also have made the choice harder. In a conversation, the US video artist Arthur Jafa—whose monumental 2016 video ›Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death‹ shows a similar interest in archives, pop and image production—once said it took him a few hours to edit his film. Leckey needed a few years.

The video premiered when contemporary art was obsessed with archives and the digestion of pop culture. Postmodern philosophers provided the theory for cultural recycling; Jacques Derrida’s ›Archive Fever‹ was published in 1995. Perhaps the interest in archives reflected the fact that a critical mass of TV images and pop music had become available, just before the internet with its deluge of material turned into a mass medium.

Leckey’s oeuvre did not end with that video, although ›Fiorucci‹ did lay the groundwork for much of what would resonate in his work later on. ›Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD‹ from 2015, for example, traces a quasi-autobiographical arc. It begins with the opening chord of ›A Hard Day’s Night‹ (released in 1964), rendered as if recorded underwater; it speaks of Joy Division and the infrastructure of England’s North. In his installations Leckey reconstructs bus stops and motorway bridges as near-mythic sites of youth. His images do something other than extracting subcultures from the archive, so they can then be scanned for signifiers of class and pop culture to be finally translated into art history or theory. »Maybe there are particular images that act like a fetish. The only way to get to them is to feel your way towards them,« Leckey says. His relationship to language and criticism is tense. »It’s like reporting back to a schoolteacher that you no longer respect.«

Strictly speaking, the show at Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin is not a retrospective; it does, however, bring together works from the very last years of the previous century to the present: videos, sculptures and installations. Leckey curates his own work to make breaks and continuities visible. Much of it was shown earlier this year in Paris at Lafayette Anticipations, but key pieces come from Julia Stoschek Foundation, which collects time-based media. The exhibition spans all three floors of a building on Leipziger Straße in East Berlin, the right angles and large glass surfaces of which had housed the GDR’s Czech Cultural Centre.

The rooms are dark and maze-like, atypical exhibition spaces. Sound leads from one work to the next, and sound pervades the show: Leckey’s subject matter is tied together by music. Yet the reverberations of Northern Soul clubs, discos and raves in forests and fields reaches us only as an echo—spliced with speech that itself becomes part of the ghostly, dreamlike sounds, half-heard at the edge of the woods. This is music about music, and visual art can’t help but arrive just a little too late.

Leckey began building speaker towers as if inventing a physical form for this complicated act of mediation. At first he used them to play field recordings from his London neighbourhood. The objects recall the sound systems Jamaican migrants brought to Britain—and with them a culture of improvised celebration in public space. For his series of installations, ›BigBoxStatueAction‹, begun in 2003, the artist positioned one of these speaker towers opposite other sculptures, for example at London’s Serpentine Gallery, facing a Henry Moore statue. »I can only know about something if I confront it,« Leckey says on the podcast. »It is the paradox of grasping something authentically through mediation.«

›Nobodaddy‹ from 2018 seems like a variation on the sound system. The sculpture draws on a late medieval depiction of the prophet Job, into whose wounds Leckey has placed speakers that play an audio track modulating his own voice. »Nobodaddy« itself is a quotation, a wordplay of »nobody« and »daddy« which the poet William Blake used to mock the absolute authority of the Christian God. Could it be that Leckey is seeking images with a completely different, maybe even religious quality?

Then everything changed. Around 2020, our relationship with digital devices and their screens shifted. »I had a real crisis of faith about art and art-making during the pandemic,« Leckey says. »I lost interest in it and hope for it, I lost any desire or need to make anything.« His DJ sets for the online radio NTS were his only creative outlet, while he obsessively studied iconography from the period just before the Renaissance. Out of this came ›Carry Me into The Wilderness‹ (2022), the story of Saint Anthony in the format of a social-media video: a psychedelic trip through the details of Lorenzo Monaco’s depiction of the hermit, a meditation on the power of the feed and of Florentine quattrocento painting—and an escape, perhaps, from nostalgia.

The exhibition title ›Enter Thru Medieval Wounds‹ refers to one of Leckey’s video essays. A narrator recounts in brutal detail how his eyes are gouged out—pure invention, of course. The story loops back to Saint Lucy and her plucked-out eyes, and to Constantine VI, the Byzantine emperor blinded by his iconophile mother for his iconoclastic leanings. »The thing about icons is that they’re not images, they are ontologically different,« Leckey says. »They are a channel of grace, you’re looking directly into heaven, and heaven is looking back at you.« The ten-minute piece feels almost like a counterpart to Leckey’s earlier work, which wrestled with an overabundance of images; here the screen is almost always black, only occasionally flashing a gold ground. »Images don’t allow us access to anything but other images.«

›Mark Leckey: Enter Thru Medieval Wounds‹, Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin, 11 SEP 2025—3 MAY 2026