Skip to content
Video essay

Leviathan

Leviathan, Mark Požlep, 2025

Two channel video installation, 37’50”

In Leviathan, artist Mark Požlep embarks on a 100-kilometre walk along the eroding Suffolk coast — from Lowestoft to Harwich — tracing the decline of one of the UK’s oldest fishing industries while exploring the deep entanglement between people, sea, and landscape.
Blending poetic travelogue, oral history, and personal encounter, Leviathan is a layered documentary work rooted in walking, listening, and witnessing.
Through a combination of text, testimony, image and sound, the project reflects on loss, memory, and resilience — as well as on the mythical presence of the sea itself: vast, indifferent, unknowable. This is not a tale of conquest, but of quiet recognition. 

Leviathan by Mark Požlep
Camera: Mark Požlep
Editing: Mark Požlep
Soundscape composition: Matthew Shenton
Interviewees: Keith Mayal, Stanley Earl

A SPILL Commission

Leviathan is supported by Suffolk County Council. Mark Požlep’s participation has been supported by the Cultural Fund, which aims to promote Slovenian culture abroad, and administered by the Slovenian Embassy in London on behalf of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of Slovenia.

Published January 2026. 2026/1

Author

  • Mark Požlep

    Mark Požlep (born 1981, Slovenia) finished his BA and MA at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and completed an Advanced Master’s Degree in Transmedia at the Sint-Lukas Campus in Brussels and HISK in Ghent. He works in the field of visual and performative arts, spatial installations and video art. His artistic practice involves journey-travels, which function both as long-durational performance/ endurance art and as an art piece in itself. It is an intense procedural exploration, using the methodology of action-research, cyclical pattern of observation and reflection. His work has been presented in numerous group and solo exhibition, includingEverything Under, Kunsthal Gent, BE, Permanent Vacation, Cukrarna , Ljubljana, Hogshead 733, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM, Ljubljana, L’Effet Domino, Manifesta 13 — Les Parallèles du Sud, Nice; Contour Biennial 9Colton as Cotton, Mechelen; Southwind, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cold Wind From The Balkans, Pera Museum Istanbul; Resilience, 7th Triennial of Slovenian Contemporary Art, MSUM Ljubljana; The Event , 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Cultural Hero , II Biennial of Quadrilateral/ BQ_ 2, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rijeka; U3 , Fifth Triennial of Slovenian Contemporary Art, Mod- erna Galerija, Ljubljana; Essl Award Winners , Essl Museum, Vienna/ Klosterneuburg.

    Photo: Kobe Wens

Back To Top