Parade
Project description
Parade by Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) is a single-screen video and sound installation commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial. First presented at Fabrica, Brighton, in 2003, the work accompanied Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
Continuing Leckey’s exploration of style, subculture and contemporary icons, Parade offers a provocative meditation on the metropolitan dandy. A solitary male figure moves through a hallucinatory urban landscape of fashion, music, consumer imagery and desire, in an oblique narrative that imagines the dandy’s possible future. Clothing and commodities acquire an almost talismanic significance, while the distorted repetition of the word “PARADE” creates an unsettling sonic pulse. Rather than evoking celebration, the procession becomes a claustrophobic cycle of images, aspirations and desires.
Leckey is known for examining youth culture, nostalgia and the relationship between popular imagery and collective memory. His influential work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), assembled from found footage of British dance cultures, established his distinctive approach to reworking images, music and cultural references. Parade extends this practice through its engagement with fashion, urban visual culture and the literary and historical traditions of dandyism, drawing on ideas of aestheticism, decadence and the bohemian outsider.
The dandy emerges as both an elegant figure and a social outcast, caught between aesthetic pleasure and consumer desire. As the protagonist navigates this world of spectacle and display, fascination gives way to entrapment, revealing a psychological landscape in which identity is shaped—and confined—by the images that surround it. Combining moving image, sound and popular culture, Paradeexplores the uneasy relationship between self-fashioning, taste and the contemporary city.
Bio
Mark Leckey is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores youth culture, popular media, nostalgia, class and collective memory. His work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
He represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2008. More recent exhibitions include O’ Magic Power of Bleakness at Tate Britain (2019) and Mark Leckey at Cabinet, London (2022).
Project details
Year: 2003
Artist: Mark Leckey
Exhibition: Parade
Commissioned by: Film and Video Umbrella
Produced in association with: Brighton Photo Biennial
Presented at: Fabrica, Brighton
Associated exhibition: Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography
24 October–30 November 2003
Format: Single-screen video and sound installation
Duration: 16 minutes 37 seconds
Country: United Kingdom