by Olivia Ladanyi // Dec. 9, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
Mark Leckey’s solo show at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ feels haunted from the moment you enter (through a medieval wound, of sorts). The air is thick with scent, the light glows from yellow sodium street lamps and distorted medieval music and low ghostly vocals make up the background noise. The exhibition opens with defaced maps, deserted bus stops and other urban detritus that surface like revenants from Leckey’s adolescence, inserting themselves into the current context.
Mark Leckey: ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ 2025, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
The first room contains some of the artist’s most recent work. In it, a lit-up, arcade-style sign that reads ‘VOID’ flashes beside ‘DAZZLEDDARK,’ an animation of an otherworldly theme park occupied by stuffed animals. In the next room, ‘Voided London 2020’ explores the empty streets of central London during lockdown. The void is palpable throughout, appearing in each of the more than 50 works on display in some way—felt rather than seen.
Mark Leckey: ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ 2025, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
A call to the basement, summoned by the hauntingly jarring yet childlike, digital sounds of ‘In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle’—a bit like a Gregorian chant being played on a kazoo—only intensifies the show’s eeriness. Once in the bowels of JSF, in dark rooms with pipes overhead and glossy black oil-slick floors that reflect hooded teenagers shining their phone flashlights and crab-walking backwards like something ungodly, there’s a creeping sense that one shouldn’t be down here. Where is everyone? Why is the work unattended? Is this even part of the show?
Mark Leckey: ‘In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle,’ 2019, video, 6′23″, color, sound, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
Down here, in the dingy basement that feels more like a storage room, is the sound installation sculpture ‘Nobodaddy,’ that’s actually a large speaker, and the titular ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ which explores the role of medieval iconography and the Byzantine belief, one Leckey shares, that religious imagery can serve as a portal to the divine. One hears Leckey’s voice, and a distorted one that bellows things like: “An image when it is attacked bleeds / so supporters of Irene rejoiced in plucking out Constantine’s offended eyes,” and the urge to quickly crawl back upstairs hits. We are thrown out into the video work ‘Dream English Kid,’ which can be watched from one of the two ‘Camden Bench’ wooden sculptures. In this piece, found footage from 1964 to 1999 is cut, repeated and combined; clear liquid spilling from a red-lipsticked mouth clangs with a retro Cinzano ad and looping visuals of bodies dancing to the beat of ‘Never Too Much.’
Mark Leckey: ‘Nobodaddy,’ 2018, sound installation, polymer foam, steel, wood, electrical components and cables, Genelec and JDL speakers, sound, 240 x 140 x 80 cm, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
There’s something inherently ghostly about the found footage Leckey uses in his video works. In ‘Dream English Kid,’ for example, forgotten underpasses, apocalyptic scenes and outer space shots loom from the uninhabited void. In ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’—the exhibition’s climax in the largest room—the ghosts of British ravers from the 70s to the 90s twirl and gurn on nightclub floors, dance and flicker on screen, their glitchy moves disrupted by Leckey’s interventions and the analog technology of the time. The early video work is flanked by towering custom speakers that amplify its physicality.
Mark Leckey: ‘Dream English Kid,’ 1964–1999 AD, 2015, video, 23′2″, color, sound, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
The ghosts appear most explicitly in the ‘Ghosted Version of Fiorucci. 20 Years Later,’ which plays on small TV screens in the small projector room that overlooks the main space, where these same apparitions of the past are static, bleached, fuzzy, nearly entirely erased by time. This revisiting or reworking of Leckey’s best known video work questions what the passage of time does to his subjects, who were never really alive or his to begin with, but mined from the archive, stitched together and brought back to life like Frankenstein’s monster.
Mark Leckey: ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,’ 1999, DVD, 14′30″ // Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London
Leckey sees the internet as a repository of memories, positioning collective memory, as well as his own personal ones, as ghosts that he exorcizes through his works. The recurring bus stops, underpasses and motorway bridges—the built environment of his youth—act as a haunted urban memory, as well as class and cultural signifiers of his upbringing in suburban northern England. The collective energy of these spaces become routes to heightened states, situated somewhere between the corporeal world and the divine.
Mark Leckey: ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ 2025, installation view at JSF Berlin // Photo by Alwin Lay
In ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds,’ the most comprehensive exhibition of Leckey’s work in the last decade, we witness the manifestation of his belief in the transformative potential of technology and visual media through the sound installations and video works on display. The looping visuals and haunting sounds that echo over the three floors accumulate to create a sensorial experience that probes the void between analog and digital, between what belongs to the past and what belongs to the present, what is real and what is divine, what is alive and what is haunted by the ghosts of collective memory. Visiting the exhibition, we’re caught in a state somewhere between belonging and not belonging, inhabiting and abandoning, remembering and exorcizing, existing and dissolving into the spectral memory of what once was.
Exhibition Info
Julia Stoschek Foundation
Mark Leckey: ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds’
Exhibition: Sept. 11, 2025–May 3, 2026
jsfoundation.art
Leipziger Straße 60, 13599 Berlin, click here for map
