Rejecting the Art World With Mark Leckey

In 2008, Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize for his seminal art film, "Industrial Light and Magic." Less than a decade earlier, he had debuted “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” an ode to misspent evenings and the long continuum of Britain’s rave subculture. It’s a haunting work that has, ironically, haunted him ever since. Now an art-world fixture, Leckey has gone on to earn critical acclaim for other video essay-style films, even curating shows, and for a brief period, teaching art at London’s Goldsmiths University.

A 2019 Tate Britain retrospective cemented his place as one of the most important voices in the British art world. In the Tate’s exhibition halls he installed a to-scale recreation of a gritty motorway bridge at Eastham Rake—a liminal space where he and his friends loitered as youths. Inside his modeled rendition, Leckey screened multiple films, including 2019’s “Under Under In,” a creepy short following a group of tracksuit-clad “scallies” as they witness a supernatural experience. Referencing Leckey’s feelings of alienation as a working-class man joining an otherwise elitist art world, the film characterizes much of his wider œuvre, grappling with status through melancholia, subcultural style and hyper-kitsch imagery.

For MANIFESTO 2024, Leckey presents “DAZZLEDDARK,” a film that unpacks similar themes. Originally commissioned for an exhibition he “edited” (he eschewed the term “curated”) last year at the Turner Contemporary in Margate—a rapidly gentrifying town in Kent, England—the project toys with the brash, poetically dilapidated nature of Britain's seaside towns and cities in a proud and actively indulgent reappraisal of taste.