Mark Leckey is a British artist whose work weaves pop culture, personal memory and digital technology into hypnotic, deeply alchemical works. Rising to prominence with his cult 1999 video collage ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’, he went on to win the 2008 Turner Prize for Industrial Light and Magic. Working across video, sculpture and installation, Leckey probes the mystical power of everyday images and objects. His exhibitions have spanned major institutions from London’s Serpentine Gallery to Paris’s Lafayette Anticipations. His latest, Enter Thru Medieval Wounds at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, features old and new works and draws on his interest in medieval iconography.
You once said you want to get video art out of the “black box”. Have you done that in the new exhibition at JSF?
And in the medieval, images did something very different. Byzantine icons… weren’t representational; they were devotional and mystical
You have to respond to the space [where] you’re showing work. And often, that leads me to something more theatrical. A few years ago, I started thinking of exhibitions not as exhibitions, but as attractions. The show includes work going all the way back to 1999, and as you enter you go through this corridor lit by sodium lamps – those old street lights from the UK that give off that Lucozade-yellow glow. It’s meant to signal a shift: to make you feel like you’re crossing into something, not just entering a gallery. It’s not about a bunch of objects to appreciate. You’re trying to draw people in, induce a state, make something immersive that works on the body as well as the mind. Not an intellectual exchange, but something closer to the psychedelic.
So, you want to induce a sense of nostalgia?
Exactly. Those lamps are from my past. People my age will remember them, and I think there’s something analogue in their presence. If you’re a digital native, the effect might even feel alien. There’s a toxicity to them. A sickly, unnatural hue. If I was taking mushrooms, when that yellow becomes far more pronounced, it was the first sign I was coming up. That’s what I’m trying to do with the work: transform the environment, change your perception. And those lights do that perfectly.
I was just watching your film work, ‘GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction’, 2010, where a Samsung double-door refrigerator muses on its own existence. Was the intention to create a psychedelic experience?
Look, I’m not looking for things that are mind bending; I’m essentially looking for things that reflect experiences I’ve had – that might confuse me profoundly. And then trying to find a way to share that. The question behind every work is: “This made me feel something – does it make you feel it too?”
And if it doesn’t?
Then fine! You know, hey ho. There are lots of works I’ve done people are indifferent about, but I don’t show them anymore. It’s like music. There are tracks I love that other people can’t stand. That doesn’t diminish my connection to them. But I am searching for reciprocity. I was watching that video of Future Islands performing on Letterman – he’s dancing weirdly, singing in this deep voice and at one point just reaches out toward the camera, almost desperately, trying to transmit something. I really believe in that kind of transmission – emotional, affective, whatever it is. Not intellectual content. It’s never direct. It’s always mediated. But you’re using those channels to try and commune with people.
Included in the new exhibition is the film/lecture work ‘Cinema in the Round’ (2006–08) from your Turner Prize-winning exhibition. It’s almost as if you wanted to change how people process images – was this the case?
That was the moment I felt I was finally beginning to understand something, and the only way to pin it down was to stage it, to make a work I could step back from and study for myself. I sensed something shifting in the world, and I needed to capture it. ‘Cinema in the Round’ was meant to reveal that shift to me – and, yes, to see if the audience felt it too.
Our generation grew up rewatching the same five videos over and over. Now, people have endless access to new visual material. Has that shift changed the way we experience images?
There’s been a huge shift in image literacy. The power of an image doesn’t sit in the image itself anymore – it’s about circulation. It’s not even representational in the old sense – it’s functional. That’s why it’s such a strange time to be an artist. It feels like images have undergone an ontological shift.
The new exhibition is called Enter Thru Medieval Wounds. Are you referring back to when images had far more resonance?
The system actively discourages people from working-class backgrounds.
Nothing today really has the same impact as those medieval images, those paintings and icons. It’s like five centuries of understanding images is now being scrambled. And in the medieval, images did something very different. Byzantine icons, for example – they weren’t representational; they were devotional and mystical, acting as portals. You weren’t looking at a depiction – you were encountering a presence: Christ, a saint, the Virgin. The image wasn’t a picture – it was the thing. That’s very different from how we engage with images now – and maybe the thing I’m still trying to reach for.
What’s brought about this shift?
Just the sheer volume of images now. It’s overwhelming. When I made ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ (1999), part of what gave those images their power was how rare they were. I had to search for them. Long, drawn-out processes just to get an image. So when I finally had them, I lingered on them. I fetishised them, really. They were precious. But now it’s the opposite. Images come in floods. It’s a constant stream scrolling past your eyes, filling up your mind. They’re still doing something but the value has shifted. Today’s images are more like memes. The most successful memes are often the most basic, or the imagery has the least resonance. That’s what makes them spread. So images now get passed around not because of what they are, but because of what they can do – how they can be used, recontextualised. It’s not about an image’s charisma or inner power. It’s about its function. I think this is why art has returned to painting: it offers something the digital image cannot – uniqueness, presence, a non-repeatable rarity.
Talking about ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’: it’s a film work that captured the shifting counterculture of dance clubs in found footage. Were you surprised by how audiences connected with it and by how it still connects with people today?
Yeah, massively. I was really uncertain about it when I first made it. I thought it was too navel-gazing, too insular. It actually started off as a kind of documentary – before Adam Curtis, but in that kind of vein. And then it shifted. I got pulled into it. It became more about my reception to these images, what they were doing to me. I didn’t think it would do all the things it’s ended up doing: communicating, resonating. I felt it rise on that wave and thought, well, that’s its moment. But strangely, this year it’s been shown more than ever – it’s been crazy. Maybe it’s that 20-year cycle in pop culture. But it makes me think of two things. First, the piece captures a moment of transformation, from analogue to digital, and I think people feel that shift in it. And second – and this is harder to explain – it was the first thing I made, and I poured everything into it. I’d been living in America, feeling homesick, obsessed with music. And through technology, I found a space to bring all those feelings together. I really believe I invested some part of my soul into it. That there’s a supernatural spirit in that work. A kind of charge.
Have you felt that with other works?
No. It’s completely unrepeatable. It’s only with distance that I’ve come to see it. But I do think there’s a kind of magic in it and that’s what people are responding to. When I was in art school in the late 80s, critical theory was really dominant. Any mystical or “essence”-based thinking was banished. Everything had to be legible in social-scientific terms. You were taught to approach work through critique. And I learned that language – I had to. But over time I’ve tried to move away from it, to make space for something more intuitive, more mystical.
Art language and critique can be exclusionary. You’ve spoken about barriers faced by artists from working-class backgrounds – is it more pronounced when you don’t come from that world?
If you come from a background like mine – working-class, non-academic – that kind of theoretical framing can feel like a wall. But I also think you need to go through it. You need the dialectic. You need to wrestle with those frameworks, then come out the other side and say: this is useful, or this isn’t. To be able to contextualise. When I’m teaching, I saw how group crits would just crush some students. The format wasn’t helpful. It didn’t build anything.
Would you intervene?
Peer influence was stronger than anything I could offer. Teachers are background noise compared to what students take from each other. I think my teaching style was always about opening things up rather than closing them down with theory. Just trying to help people clear a path. In most cases, the main thing is just overcoming doubt. That’s what I struggled with too. I had no confidence at art school. None.
What changed?
I left art school thinking I wasn’t going to be an artist. Theory had arrived hard, and it all felt alien. I just thought: this isn’t for me. I’m not smart enough for this. So I tried other things – music videos, whatever – but nothing really landed. Then someone asked me to make something about music videos. That became ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’.
You’ve described your home town of Ellesmere Port as a violent place, and you were often in trouble with the police. Considering your upbringing, going to art school is quite an achievement…
I left school at 15. It was the early 80s, and the whole region was in collapse. The boat yard industry was gone; unemployment was everywhere. There were no opportunities, and university wasn’t something my family would’ve considered. So you just ended up hanging around, getting into trouble. And yeah, with that came violence. But going to art school felt less extraordinary back then. I only went because it was a well-trodden path. All the musicians I loved had gone to art school: Bowie, Pete Townshend, Bryan Ferry. And they came from working-class backgrounds too. Plus, I got a full grant and housing benefit. The state made it financially viable. I was better off at art school than on the dole. That made the decision easy. But now it’s so much harder with tuition fees. The system actively discourages people from working-class backgrounds. It’s gone back to being this middle-class pursuit again, like it was before the 60s. That’s the fear – that it returns to being something exclusive and bourgeois.
Would you still go to art school now?
If I was in my 20s, I probably wouldn’t with fees being what they are. But also, this investigation into what images have become and all the rest of it – I think that would be something I’d pursue online.
But wouldn’t you miss the social side, even the critique?
That critique exists online, if you were involved in some kind of discord server, on some kind of online group. But art still does offer that gathering of bodies in a ritualised space. So art still has that function; if you want an embodied experience, art certainly still offers that.
- Enter Thru Medieval Wounds, Sep 11, 2025, through May 3, 2026, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Mitte
