HARDCORE / LOVE at Conditions

At the time of writing this, the curtain has just fallen on HARDCORE / LOVE, a two-person exhibition of video works by Mark Leckey and Arthur Jafa. For the uninitiated, Leckey and Jafa are two giants of the medium, and although video-based exhibitions rarely get the press coverage they deserve (I’m thinking of recent shows such as Isabel Barfod at LUX in Highgate, and Alexis Kyle Mitchell at PEER in Hoxton, both of which were excellent and yet I saw no reportage on socials nor on the art press that was on my radar), this run was bound to attract crowds.

Curating video art can be tricky; perhaps more than other mediums, the curator needs to have a good black book of art-world types, who they can be sure will turn up and essentially provide some free PR. Whereas you can write about a painting or sculpture, taking photos for the ‘gram so that the audience gets the gist in the digital realm, there is usually more to video, more sensory commitment required. Video and film demand an active willpower from the viewer to get through it (which admittedly was markedly the case for both Barfod and Mitchell’s work, at around an hour-long duration each. In our times of chronic low attention spans, it takes an effort to get people through the door, and have them stay seated for an hour).

Arthur Jafa, Love is the message, the message is Death, 2016. Installation view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City, 12 November - 17 December 2016. Photo by Thomas Muller. Image courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Spruth Magers. Copyright Arthur Jafa.

The combination of a black book of art-world darlings, short durations, and social media buzz is where Conditions’ showing of HARDCORE / LOVE is relatively unique. The first caveat should be that Conditions is run by Gavin Brown, international artist and art dealer, so if anyone could bring the people to somewhere out of the ordinary, it’s going to be him. Comprised of tandem screenings of Leckey’s seminal work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Jafa’s Love is the message, the message is Death (2016), you could sit through both in just over twenty minutes. The location? Now that’s when things get a bit spicy: The Whitgift Centre in Croydon, anyone? Despite being sandwiched by grassroots gallery space Turf Projects and (erm) Pollock’s Toy Museum, not many people will associate Croydon with a burgeoning arts scene, and that’s entirely fair. As a lifelong South Londoner, I’ve seen Croydon change slightly with the inevitable demands of gentrification, but not so much that you’d expect three units of its main shopping centre to be taken over by museums and galleries.

When HARDCORE / LOVE opened to the public in June, the South Londoner in me did find it entertaining to see art people get misty-eyed about Croydon. Suddenly everyone had fond memories of “the hood”, desperate to be part of the action. Edgy shots of the unaesthetically pleasing corners of CR0 were plastered everywhere, as if audiences were waiting for a round of applause for making it to the end of the Windrush line. Whether that was true or not was fairly irrelevant to me, but the sudden romanticising and laying claim to Croydon was ultimately bizarre.

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999. Film still. Copyright Mark Leckey. Courtesy of Tate.

This ickiness may have been the reason it took me so long to get down there myself, despite not living far away; I didn’t want to bump into anyone being overtly touristy about Croydon and fetishising it. Yes, you had to shlep all the way from Islington on the Overground, we’re really grateful you’re here. Given that I (along with many other Goldsmiths alumni) are pretty besotted with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, I was very keen to check out the pairing of Leckey with Jafa, despite all my aforementioned misgivings. A lot of the chat about the Conditions space praises its accessibility, that it’s so refreshing to have a space that feels open to the public, not just the art crowd, but going there on a Saturday afternoon, I found this not to be the case; there was a desk in the front-facing part of the unit, with two people on laptops, much like every other gallery. If I wasn’t a regular visitor of galleries, I can’t imagine I would feel any more welcome than any other art space. This isn’t to say that the people at the desk were unfriendly in the slightest, I just feel that some of the commentary really did get carried away by the fact that it was based in Croydon, and some degree of common sense got lost in the excitement.

In the adjoining part of the unit was a dark space, where Leckey’s work was playing on the left side of the wall. A non-verbal mosaic of a video documentary covering decades of dance culture in the UK, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is beloved by large swathes of audiences. Every age group will have a nostalgic trip watching it, either feeling wistful for the dancing days of their youth, or for an imagined time where dance spaces weren’t generally racked with phones, cameras, and debt-inducing drink prices. Despite its cult status, every time I see Leckey’s film, I am always perplexed by the reminder of its lack of narrative. I always remember it being slightly more coherent than it is. Produced in 1999, it feels elegiac already, as if the artist was poised to say goodbye to the way nightlife is, the way that music videos are.

Once the whispers of "Fiorucci, Fiorucci" die down and the video ends, Jafa’s Love is the message, the message is Death began to play on the corresponding wall on the right hand side, forcing viewers to turn a full 180-degrees and pay full attention. I must say I loved this curatorial decision; playing with short attention spans and the display possibilities thanks to the immateriality of film is very smart. Now, to my embarrassment, I had never seen Jafa’s film in the flesh before, despite the fact that it is on the majority of ‘Best Contemporary Art of the Millennium’ lists. 

Now, I can confidently say that for me, it is up there with a particular genre of film art that I am deeply drawn to: the patchwork traumatic-tragicomic-social justice videos (a title I’ve just made up), such as Xanadu by Robert Boyd, and Jason Hendrik Hansma’s In Our Real Life. Anchored by a theme of social concern (Jafa’s being the African American lived experience, Boyd’s being the optics of war and state violence, and Hendrik Hansma’s being climate catastrophe), each artist has then used low-resolution documentary footage with a powerful or kitsch music choice in order to bring serious concerns to the masses. This genre is my favourite kind of contemporary art, bar none, and the fact that I was moved, shaken and definitely stirred by Jafa’s work, which is still less than a decade old, meant that it was welcomed into this category.

Photograph of Conditions in Croydon, courtesy of Centrale and Whitgift.

Love is the message… is a collage of mass media imagery about the African American lived experience, ranging from the mid-twentieth century minstrelsy (although popularised in the nineteenth century) and blackface to examples of Black (or African American) Excellence in the media, via TikTok-style filming on iPhones by Black creators. The soundtrack is key to this genre of artwork, and while Kanye West’s Ultra Lightbeam is definitely powerful, it’s unfortunate that nine years after making this, West’s personal downfall precedes him. Post- his infamous ”Slavery [was] a choice” comment, he wouldn’t be the first choice for many artists in 2025, but back in 2016, he was a different public figure altogether, and there is (unfortunately) no disputing that musically, he remains a genius.

Moreso than Leckey’s film, Love is the message, the message is Death, has no directly linear narrative. We are not brought through a chronological order of African American oppression towards shiny examples of Black Excellence in the media (Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Beyoncé, Michael Jordan and Jimi Hendrix all feature). Everything is all together at once, in case anyone was wondering whether the struggle was over.

The piece is full of police brutality; the artist said in a conversation with Leckey that Love is the message… came as a response to seeing footage of violence towards African American people everywhere. While neither films are “funny”, there are vaguely amusing breaks in the footage of Jafa’s work which drift it towards the “tragicomedy” genre. In one clip of someone being manhandled violently in a police cell, it is suddenly broken by the song Teach Me How to Dougie, a catchy and indisputably light interlude. The whole work has a sensation of TikTok and social media scrolling about it; everything moves so fast that the viewer doesn’t really feel the same emotion from one moment to the next. In the same interview with Leckey from 2020, he said:

“At a certain point I did stand up and say, “I don’t want to speak for all Black people, but I can say with a lot of confidence: nothing about these images surprises any Black person.” You know what I mean? We didn’t need a picture or video to know this kind of shit was and is going on, our whole history has been this way. And if it hasn’t happened to you directly, it’s like seven degrees of separation, gestalt trauma.” [1] 

Arthur Jafa, Love is the message, the message is Death, 2016. Film still. Credit: courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Spruth Magers, and Sadie Coles HQ. Copyright Arthur Jafa.

In both films, the splintering of different pieces of footage leaves the viewer gunning for a crescendo which never really happens. The nostalgia in Fiorucci… is palpable, and in the days where the nightlife industry is desperately struggling under post-COVID socioeconomic changes on individual and collective scales, it would be a very differently made film in 2025. Fiorucci is, in the artist’s own words, “a ghost film” [2], but as a stark contrast, Jafa almost puts those concerns into perspective. The 180-degree switches between tragedy, humour, crisis and talent are dizzying, but without narration, the ability to convey the multiplicities of the African American experience without reducing it to either polarity is stunning.

The Financial Times deemed Conditions “the art world’s next big thing” [3], but given that the Whitgift Centre is mostly deserted, crumbling under the obsolescence of in-person commerce, the physicality of this comment isn’t to be taken too literally. However, the concept of bringing high-profile art to alternative communities where they are is, ultimately, admirable.

The choice of displaying Leckey and Jafa together is an interesting one, and while I have deep appreciation for both works, I feel that with this exhibition there was just about enough breathing space for both. Their respective messaging is very different, but that ensures that concepts presented in both works do not entangle or dilute each other. I, for one, was excited to see the highest calibre of contemporary art come to a part of South London that is often considered unworthy of such spoils. Whether a display like HARDCORE / LOVE is playing into gentrification’s hands, or whether it really is bringing art to the people, remains to be seen.

[1] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/12/03/extract-or-why-i-made-love-is-the-messagearthur-jafa-describes-the-inspiration-for-his-seminal-film

[2] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leckey-fiorucci-made-me-hardcore-t11817

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/601022a5-7715-47ff-a420-019499b1a17d  

HARDCORE / LOVE, an exhibition of work by Mark Leckey and Arthur Jafa. 28 June - 10 August 2025. Conditions, London. conditions.studio