Parade by Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) is a single-screen video and sound installation that immerses viewers in a surreal and unsettling exploration of style, subculture, and the image of the modern dandy. Commissioned for the Brighton Photo Biennial and shown at Fabrica alongside the exhibition Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography, the work acts as a meditation on decadence and metropolitan identity, refracted through a lens of hallucinatory desire and distorted sound.
At the heart of Parade is a claustrophobic narrative that resists clarity. It presents a solitary male figure adrift in a psychedelic, consumerist landscape—a speculative imagining of what the dandy might look like in the near future, seduced and consumed by his surroundings. The sound design plays a crucial role in heightening the viewer’s disorientation: a fractured, echoing repetition of the word “PARADE” becomes a hypnotic pulse, lending a sense of dread to the work’s visual excess. The parade here is not celebratory—it is feverish, obsessive, and inward-turning.
Leckey is known for his fascination with youth culture, nostalgia, and the shifting boundary between personal memory and collective media history. In earlier works like Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Dream English Kid, he manipulated found footage to create poetic, elegiac reflections on class, identity, and the social rituals of postwar Britain.
Parade continues this approach but moves into more ambiguous, speculative territory. It draws heavily on the aesthetics of fashion, music videos, and advertising, but refracts them into something darker—something hovering between cultural homage and critique.
What emerges is a portrait of a culture at once entranced and unmoored, where surface and style mask deeper anxieties. The dandy, traditionally a figure of elegance and self-possession, is here recast as isolated, entrapped, and caught in an endless loop of consumption. Leckey’s work doesn’t moralize, but it disturbs. It questions the narratives we build around identity and taste in an era saturated with images and sound.
As with much of Leckey’s practice, Parade operates on multiple registers: it is historical and futuristic, personal and cultural, poetic and analytical. It is as much about the lineage of dandyism as it is about the fragmented nature of subjectivity in the digital age. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial, Parade exemplifies Leckey’s ongoing commitment to making work that is as conceptually rich as it is viscerally affecting.
Parade is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial.
