Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to Cripta747.
Mark Leckey. Catabasis
Up to 2.06.2026
At the second underground level of the GTT car park in Valdo Fusi, light surrenders to shadow. Across walls marked by graffiti, a non-linear sequence of fragmented and reassembled images unfolds — drawn from backstage photographs, stills from the video O Magic Power of Bleakness (2019), and images generated through artificial intelligence inspired by William Blake’s engraving Nebuchadnezzar (1795). The car park is transformed into a timeless place, suspended between urban infrastructure and symbolic threshold: a rite of passage into a liminal space where the everyday opens onto transcendent dimensions.
Catabasis by Mark Leckey was curated by Cripta747 and Caterina Avataneo and presented as part of EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival. The installation, on view until June 2, overlays visual fragments like layers of sediment. At the center of the work, five boys move beneath an overpass, within an environment that oscillates between the everyday and the supernatural, between the solidity of asphalt and an almost spectral dimension. Originally commissioned by Tate Britain, the work is based on a 1:1 scale reconstruction of an overpass on the M53 motorway, here transposed into a non-linear sequence, like memories resurfacing in fragments. Alongside these materials are digital reworkings of Nebuchadnezzar by William Blake, depicting the Babylonian king punished for his hybris and condemned to crawl upon the earth like a beast. Through artificial intelligence, the eighteenth-century engraving dissolves and recomposes itself, becoming an allegory of the digital realm conceived as a vast repository where street culture and mystical symbolism intertwine.
The graffiti on the car park walls are not backdrop: they enter the work as active elements, marks of a transit space where collective identity takes shape in the shadows, far from official circuits. It is a topography Leckey knows deeply. Flyovers, underpasses, fairgrounds, car parks: peripheral infrastructures that belong as much to his personal biography as to a shared generational imagination. These are liminal spaces, thresholds where the everyday opens onto the unexpected — where sampling and recomposition, practices central to the artist’s work, reveal the capacity of the digital to make archaic visions resurface as flickering apparitions.
