Mark Leckey

UniAddDumThs

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on Felix the Cat, 2014, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on Felix the Cat, 2014, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on „Maschine“, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on „Maschine“, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on „Tier“, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on „Mensch“, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view into „Monster“, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, installation view, UniAddDumThs, view on Copy of Louise Bourgeois’ NATURE STUDY (1984), 2014, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Photo: Philipp Hänger/Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey, poster for the exhibition, UniAddDumThs, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Design: Atlas Studio

Exhibitiontext and related events (PDF)
An Interview with Mark Leckey by Dan Fox (PDF)
The Artist as Curator – Issue #8 including Elena Filipovic’s essay on UniAddDumThs (PDF)

UniAddDumThs is a new installation by the former Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey (*1964) that is ambiguously—and provocatively —both an exhibition the artist curated and an artwork he authored. The British artist spent years gathering a pantheon of digital images of archaic exotica, artworks, and visionary machines from the Internet, and then several more years while the “original” referents for that data were tracked down and borrowed from institutions around the world. The result was a show Leckey curated in 2013 called The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things. At Kunsthalle Basel, Leckey presents an “Ersatz” of that show, comprised mostly of copies, including various 3D printed objects, 2D cardboard cutouts, photographic reproductions, and other replicas of the original objects, and calls it UniAddDumThs. Set in a specially designed scenography, the result is at once strange, surreal, and humorous —a revelation of the artist’s persistent fascination with “dumb things”as much as with technology, the Internet, and the slippery relationship between the real and its simulacrum.