Mark Leckey - To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body)

In the first of a series of co-commissions from Art Night and Fact, Mark Leckey whips up a dazzling invocation to a contemporary suburban mythos with To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body), an urgent prayer to broken glass and haunted concrete. Developed out of a short video released alongside In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle, the astonishing audio collage mixtape Leckey created for Boomkat’s Documenting Sound tape series using a harddrive of material left over from his 2019 installation at Tate Britain, O’ Magic Power Of Bleakness, To the Old World is another dispatch from the same mystical place. Transfiguring found footage of a young man smashing through a bus stop into an auspicious omen of transition and transformation, the artist enacts a supernatural shattering of the mundane surface of contemporary life. “There is a line from the song ‘I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass’ by Nick Lowe that goes: “I love the sound of breaking glass. Deep into the night. I love the sound of its condition