Catabasis

Text by Cripta747 e Caterina Avataneo:

Catabasis is a newly commissioned site-specific intervention by British artist Mark Leckey. Taking its title from the ancient myth of the descent into the underworld, the work unfolds as a non-linear sequence of fragments drawn from footage and behind-the-scenes photographs of Leckey’s video O Magic Power of Bleakness (2019), alongside AI-generated images inspired by the iconic William Blake engraving Nebuchadnezzar (1795). These visual materials coalesce into an oneiric rite of passage leading from the apparent ordinariness of the urban environment, toward deeper temporal layers, where archaic imaginaries and prophetic visions begin to appear. As a group of five boys travels into spectral regions, youth culture, memory and fantasy overlap. The carpark itself plays a significant role, echoing the peripheral urban infrastructures that frequently recur throughout Leckey’s practice and that belong to both his personal experience and the coming of age at large. Its graffiti become integral to the commission, signs of a site of transit where identity and collective experience take shape. Through sampling, recombination and digital manipulation, Leckey traces transcendence, finding the extraordinary in the technologically mediated everyday. It is within movement, a descent in this case, as well as within image-transmission, that the collective imagination resurfaces as a flickering vision of possible futures.

Artist’s biography:

Over the past twenty-five years, Mark Leckey (born in 1964 in Birkenhead, United Kingdom) has explored contemporary visual culture, channelling the radical transformations brought about by the shift from analogue to digital technologies. Leckey’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions over the years, including at Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo (2024); Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2022, 2020); Tate Britain, London (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2016-2017); and the Madre Museum, Naples, Italy (2015). She has participated in the Belgrade Biennial (2021), the Carnegie International (2013), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010). In 2008, Leckey was awarded the Turner Prize.

A project by Cripta747 and EXPOSED, created with the support of Regione Piemonte and Fondazione CRT. In collaboration with GTT, promoted by Città di Torino, with the patronage of Circoscrizione 1.