Must-See: Mark Leckey Returns to the Dancefloor

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition

Despite being primarily video-based, Mark Leckey’s exhibition ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds’ at the Julia Stoschek Foundation is structured around two other media: sound and architecture. Sound, in particular, dominates each room, where it acts not as mere accompaniment to the video works but as their raison d’être. Leckey’s well-known early work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), for example, uses found footage to trace the evolution of British dance subcultures, while the most recent piece in the show, the titular Enter Thru Medieval Wounds (2025), is a radio play exploring the role of medieval iconography, whose audio track reaches us through speakers embedded in the gaping wounds of a statue in the museum’s dingy basement storage room. Custom speaker towers from the artist’s Sound Systems (2001/12) add an immersive dimension to the club scenes depicted in the show.

During a gallery tour, Leckey told us that he often thinks of his works as music videos, where the visuals coalesce around the audio, rather than the other way around. DJing his own after-party following the Berlin Art Week opening, Leckey embodies this deep, affective fascination with music and the niche cultures that surround it. As he puts it in the show’s accompanying catalogue: ‘I want art to expand toward music, because that’s where I feel more at home.’

Home is another unmistakable thread. The concrete industrial architecture of bridges and underpasses in the video In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle (2019) and the sickly yellow glow of suburban bus stop lights in Untitled, Sodium Lights (2016) seem to follow us between rooms. Having grown up in the Liverpool area, Leckey consistently gestures towards the geographical and class signifiers of the region of his youth, whether through the concrete barriers of seaside port towns (Inflatable Tetrapod, 2025) or video works approximating reconstructed memories, as in the remixed archival footage of Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD (2015). These ecstatic encounters with the sounds and architectures of Leckey’s adolescence not only act as gateways to another, bygone time but seem to reach out to us in the present, almost involuntarily triggering experiences of collective energy and social exuberance – echoing the medieval belief that images can be portals to the divine.

Mark Leckey’s ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds’ is on view at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, until 3 May 2026

_{Main image: Mark Leckey, Pearl Vision, 2012, video still. Courtesy: Cabinet, London}