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

In the first of a series of cocommissions 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 Boomkats 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