British artist Mark Leckey is presenting his most comprehensive exhibition in ten years, titled "Enter Thru Medieval Wounds," at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. The sprawling show, featuring over 50 works across three floors, examines Leckey's central thesis that filmic images serve as quasi-magical portals in our secular age, much like religious imagery did during medieval times.
The exhibition's title encapsulates what critic Martin Herbert describes as Leckey's metaphysics. Drawing parallels between medieval contemplation of religious images as "channels of grace" and contemporary engagement with recorded media, Leckey proposes that our collective archive of film—from early cinema through videotape to computer-generated imagery—functions as a pathway to transcendence in an increasingly godless world.
A highlight of the exhibition is Leckey's seminal 1999 work "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore," presented on a large screen with one of the artist's custom sound systems. This 15-minute video traces UK dance subcultures through heavily manipulated amateur footage, from Northern Soul dancers in bright ballrooms to ecstatic acid house participants. The work, now recognized as prescient of "hauntological culture," looks back at postwar British working-class creativity with both nostalgia and unease, employing distorted and slowed footage that creates an eerie estrangement from the past.
The show opens with recent works that continue these themes. Visitors first encounter a room bathed in sodium lighting that transforms skin tones to grey, creating what Herbert describes as a "secular baptism" in 1980s streetlamp ambiance. The video-sculpture "To the Old World (Thank You For the Use of Your Body)" (2021) features a screen embedded in a sculptural bus stop, showing digitally manipulated footage of youth filming themselves crashing through bus stop windows—a commentary on contemporary entertainment for "a serfdom of broke bored teens."
Leckey's advocacy for "technological animism" appears throughout the exhibition, suggesting that the act of recording confers a form of eternal life. "Felix Gets Broadcasted" (2007) recreates the historic moment when Felix the Cat became the first televised image via a rotating papier-mâché mannequin. In his filmed lecture-performance "Cinema-in-the-Round" (2006-08), Leckey discusses the "hyper-solid blackness" of Felix cartoons, theorizing how certain two-dimensional images can shift toward three-dimensionality.
This movement between dimensions represents a leitmotif in Leckey's practice, though with mixed results according to Herbert's assessment. Works like "GreenScreenRefrigerator" (2010), featuring a sentient smart fridge discoursing in increasingly emotional and violent language about preservation, demonstrate the artist's skill. However, some sculptural elements, including metal structures housing videos and the polyurethane "Inflatable Tetrapod" (2025), are criticized for too closely mimicking the "drabness and tackiness" of their real-world counterparts.
The exhibition showcases Leckey's mastery in film's "recombinant elasticity." "Dream English Kid, 1964-1999 AD" (2015) constructs a cultural autobiography through found footage from each year of the artist's pre-fame life, including moon landings, vintage film clips, London street scenes, and Joy Division concert bootlegs. Meanwhile, "Shades of Destructors" (2005) creates an allegory of rebellious youth by combining a 1975 TV adaptation of a Graham Greene story, clips from "Donnie Darko," and documentation of Gordon Matta-Clark's 1973 "Bronx Floors" project.
The exhibition runs through May 3, 2026, offering visitors an immersive journey through Leckey's vision of recorded media as a crucible for death, rebirth, and potential eternity. As Herbert notes, if viewers didn't understand Leckey's conceptual framework in his earlier career, this comprehensive retrospective makes his intentions unmistakably clear.
