When Art Beats to the Rhythm of the World: Jafa & Leckey Unveil Visual Revolutions

A cascade of images—faces warped by joy, fury, memory—collides with a beat, and suddenly time fractures: that’s Arthur Jafa’s cinematic pulse in public view, and Mark Leckey’s nostalgic reverie unfolding beside it.

Jafa, who rose from behind-the-camera genius to front-line visual provocateur, recently showcased DJ-like video sets: projecting Black history as living collage, scored to cultural resonance. “A big part of what I do is just compiling images,” he said, describing a method that feels equal parts ritual and excavation. Meanwhile, across the hall, Leckey loops Britain’s collective memory: rave nights, suburban ghosts, found footage strains of working-class identity echoing from Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore to his latest audio-video essays .

Memory As Sonic Collage

Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death unravels in rapid-fire edits set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”—a two-way mirror of collective Black experience. Clips of police violence throb alongside church praise; joy bleeds into grief. Jafa describes it as “black visual intonation”—not a manifesto but a rhythm, “like syncopation,” he clarifies. Here music becomes structure, video becomes voice, each frame an insistence: we were here, we feel, we endure.

Ghostwaves of Pop Culture

Leckey works differently—quietly spectral. His early work, built from VHS clips of Northern Soul dancers and rave kids, haunts like a spectral memory: “I always think of Fiorucci as a ghost film,” he admitted. Now a Turner Prize-winning staple, his 2023 DAZZLEDDARK digs into seaside kitsch and class histories, crafting mood more than narrative—a soft anthem to those liminal spaces between belonging and erasure.

These aren’t mere retrospectives—they’re devices for cultural excavation. Jafa’s work is combustible: urgent, visceral, woven from trauma and transcendence. Leckey’s feels elegiac: a slow unspooling of the sensory archive. Together, they ask us to look: what lies in the frames we’ve ignored? What histories pulse beneath our nostalgia?

In an art world often obsessed with novelty, these artists remind us that real power lives in re-seeing—remixing memory until it speaks with fresh clarity. We came for images; we stay for the echoes. And as the reel stutters to black, we’re left to wonder: which beckoning ghost will rise next—and what truth will it demand?