“There’s a big motorway bridge in there,” said artist Mark Leckey, pointing to the large gallery in Tate Britain hosting his ambitious and immersive exhibition, which opens to the public on Tuesday.
Specifically, it is a recreation of an M53 concrete flyover where an eight-year-old Leckey, growing up in Ellesmere Port, would hang out and play with his friends.
Walls have been removed at Tate Britain to install a lifesize replica of the bridge in one large, cavernous display space where visitors will experience three Leckey works.
The idea is for it to feel like an immersive theatrical show, said Clarrie Wallis, Tate’s senior curator of contemporary British art. “It starts on the hour and it is, if you like, in three acts. Visitors have the opportunity to dip in and out, so if you miss one piece you can come back in the same day.”
Leckey is returning to Tate Britain for the first time since he won the Turner Prize there in 2008. Always difficult to categorise, his three works explore themes of youth, class, memory and nostalgia.
There is one new work and two that are considered seminal to his career. One is Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore from 1990, a compilation of dancefloor footage from Northern soul to rave, which was described in the Guardian as “perhaps the finest portrayal of British nightlife ever captured”.
The other is Dream English Kid, 1964-1999 AD, a video work dating from 2015 prompted by Leckey’s discovery of a YouTube video of a Joy Division gig he was at in 1979.
The new work in the show stems directly from his memories of the bridge. Under Under In, filmed on iPhones, tells a story of five teenagers under a bridge haunted by fairies, and what happens when one of the children gets abducted.
Leckey said his childhood memories were vague ones. “When I was in here yesterday I realised what the show is about, it is about recollection and how things get recalled.”
Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson said it was less an exhibition and more “an audio-visual play” in which Leckey mixes up “all manner of ways of seeing the world – biography, social history, pop culture, anthropology, magic, the unexplained”. The experience for visitors is not like a documentary, “but more like a dream”.
