< input > avec Mark Leckey

A multidisciplinary artist born in 1964 in Liverpool and awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 2006, Mark Leckey has always crossed disciplines, forging work at the crossroads between conceptual art, pop culture and acute reflection on technology. Leckey's installations revolve around the excavation of memory and fantasized or real memories, through consumer objects which crystallize their resurgence, from Benson & Hedges cigarette packets to columns of speakers specific to sound systems including Toys "R" Us toys.

Close to the philosophical current known as “speculative realism”, he is both a peripheral observer of society and its commercial products, while investing in their phenomenon : a form of “metaphysical Marxism” which is embodied in pop artifacts, vital elements of his work. At the heart of his process revolves a myriad of manufactured objects to which he lends a consciousness, a voice and an autonomous life, detached from the human being who shaped them. “Many of my works find their source in things and experiences from my childhood and youth that still haunt me,” explains the sixty-year-old visual artist who enchants the most banal trinkets and makes technological consumerism the epicenter of class struggle. The artist thus draws up a topography of his own psyche, and by extension that of an entire generation alienated by capitalism. In touch with British society in its most unequal aspects, Leckey never betrayed his origins and his international reputation allowed him to set up an art school in Cornwall, providing access to non-elitist education in a region culturally disadvantaged. Having gone viral in the early 2000s, his video Fiorucci made me Hardcore traces the history of clubbing in England – from Northern Soul to acid house – through party archives edited in slow motion. It will be followed by Dream English Kid 1964 - 1999AD in 2006, emblem of the hauntological movement. 

In 2014, he collaborated with experimental musician Florian Hecker and presented a major retrospective at Wiels in Brussels. (Enchanter la matière vulgaire), accompanied by a monograph. 

In the O’ Magic Power Of Bleakness exhibition at Tate Britain in 2019, he recreated a section of the M53 motorway overlooked by a bridge. In 2022, its exhibition Carry Me into the Wilderness revisits a portrait of Saint Anthony by Lorenzo Monaco, a 14th century Italian painter. At the end of 2023, the Turner Contemporary museum offers him carte blanche. In particular, he presents DAZZLEDDARK, a new 3D video which diverts the childish world of fairgrounds. It also exhibits the work of a new generation of electronic artists and musicians. In 2023, he signed The Bridge, his first work in virtual reality, of which he will present extracts exclusively. Recently, he programmed two evenings of experimental music at Café Oto in London. 

Hosted by Julien Bécourt, the < input > cycle celebrates the union between visual arts and sound arts.