BRUSSELS.- Mark Leckey is undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in a generation of artists that emerged in the late 1990s, a recognition that was confirmed when he was awarded the prestigious Turner Art Prize in 2008. Following a decade of near-abstinence from artmaking and a protracted absence from the art world after his studies at the Newcastle Polytechnic from 1987 to 1990, Leckey returned to making work, and by 1999 had made an indelible impression with his video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. This ode to British dance culture – from northern soul to rave – is justly recognized as one of the most iconic works at the intersection of visual art and pop culture, in the manner it excavates the relationship between disciplines. And with it, the artist mapped the field of interests that would serve as the foundation for much of his later work.

In recent years, Leckey’s avid exploration of the technological developments that shape the world have made him an extraordinary chronicler of what defines our times: a society transformed by the Internet and advancing technologies, in which the relations between people, things, and the world around them are subject to permanent renegotiation. His works raise questions about how to deal with the ever more dominant role of global brands, products, and digital images, and the affective pull that these have on us. These themes are addressed in Leckey’s work in a reflection on our present condition that is as astute and critical as it is entertaining.

It was as an extension of his artistic practice, in which collecting, sampling and appropriating digital images from the Internet are part and parcel of daily ‘research’, that in 2013 Mark Leckey curated a traveling exhibition composed of the actual objects contained in his vast collection of digital images. The exhibition was organised by Hayward Touring, London, and entitled The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things. It assembled an incredible array of archaeological artefacts, contemporary artworks and visionary machines on loan from numerous institutions, estates and artists around the world. Included, for example, were a medieval stone gargoyle, an Egyptian cat mummy, a mandrake root, a uterus-shaped vase and a Cyberman helmet. These rubbed shoulders with works by Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Pierre Molinier, Allen Jones and Tøyen, to name a few.

Mark Leckey: Lending Enchantment to Vulgar Materials is the artist’s largest exhibition to date. Taking his title from a letter by Guillaume Apollinaire, where he claims that he and the filmmaker Georges Méliès ‘lend enchantment to vulgar materials’, Leckey identifies a similar impulse at the heart of his own practice. That is precisely what the exhibition highlights by bringing together new and older pieces in each of the media in which the artist has worked. The exhibition features nearly all of the artist’s videos, including his video of dance hall youth culture, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, and others that have been rarely shown, alongside key sculptural works from the last decade, providing a long overdue survey of Leckey’s remarkable oeuvre.

As a new production for his exhibition at WIELS, Leckey returns to the ideas behind that exhibition in order to create an ambitious project that further turns to the process of what the artist calls ‘aggregating’ (others might call it ‘curating’). Making a redux of The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things exhibition, from various cardboard stand-ins, 3-D printed copies and replicas of the original objects in that show, and including only a single ‘original’ – the hand-shaped 13th Century silver reliquary – Leckey creates a new work entitled UniAddDumThs that returns the ‘real’ borrowed artworks of his exhibition to their status as digital avatars. If the reliquary piece stands alone as the only auratic thing in Leckey’s new artwork-as-ersatz-exhibition, it is as much as an ur-representation of the ‘real’ (the relic as a literal piece of the real) as a metaphor for the digital (literally, the digits of the hand): the real and the digital laying at the very centre of Leckey’s work. As in his practice more broadly, where he explores the tenuous boundaries between the simulacral, the virtual, the ersatz and their real world referents, Leckey’s undertaking exemplifies a persistent interest in how technology creates desires, memories and fantasies.

Mark Leckey was born in 1964 in Birkenhead, England, and currently lives and works in London. The 2008 Turner Prize winning artist studied at Newcastle Polytechnic and is a reader in fine art at Goldsmiths, London, and served as professor of film studies at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main from 2005 to 2009. He has exhibited his work widely, with solo shows at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2012); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, England (2010); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2007); Portikus, Frankfurt (2005); and Migros Museum, Zurich (2003). His work has been included in numerous large-scale international exhibitions, including the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013); The Encyclopedic Palace, Venice Biennale (2013); Ghosts in the Machine, New Museum, New York (2012); 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2010); Moving Images: Artists & Video/Film, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); Playing Homage, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery; Sympathy for the Devil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Istanbul Biennial (2005); and Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastián (2004). He has presented his lecture-performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and he participated in Performa 11 (2011) in New York. Leckey has also pursued curatorial projects, including The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (touring throughout the UK, 2013).