Mike Nelsonโs claustrophobic installations broke new ground two decades ago, long before โimmersiveโ exhibitions became urban leisure-time staples. This overdue survey of the British artistโs career revisits and remodels his key works, and is dominated by the extraordinary, Hayward Gallery-filling The Deliverance and the Patience (2001). Itโs a monstrous, jerry-built labyrinth of dingy rooms, full of grubby decorations that hint at other cultures, transience and anxiety: a bare office counter, a travel bureau advertising cheap flights to Lagos and Singapore, a makeshift prayer-room, and even a grungy bar into which you might have wandered in 1970s Amsterdam.
The effect is both compelling and disconcerting; youโre in a gallery, and youโre also a thousand miles away, in someone elseโs life, in some other time. With no sight of the Haywardโs concrete walls and polished floors to frame the experience, youโre trapped inside a prism of global modern life, which speaks quietly of cultural divisions between East and West, and the history of war, trade and migration.
Itโs a subtle politics that Nelson, twice nominated for the Turner Prize, steadily weaves between fact and fiction. The showโs entrance is through a gloomy red-lit store-room, racks piled with bric-a-brac and architectural salvage. Itโs the leftovers of I, Impostor, Nelsonโs installation for the British Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, which pitched art aficionados into the dusty interiors of a historic Istanbul inn โ here reduced to components, reminding us of the artistโs role as a storyteller. But another chunk of that work, an antique photographerโs darkroom, is re-made in the bowels of this showโs most dramatic piece, a reimagining of the American artist Robert Smithsonโs 1970 land-art piece Partially Buried Woodshed, the woodshed here buried under a sand dune strewn with oil barrels.
This interest in where exactly art and life diverge means that Nelsonโs installations, full of opaque literary and art-historical references, resist being mere entertainment. His more recent works have moved on from the โimmersiveโ interiors: The Asset Strippers (2019), for example, is made from industrial machinery salvaged from bankrupt British companies. Its components are not unlovely as sculptural forms, but their dysfunction makes them sad monuments to deindustrialisation, and an oblique criticism of the creative economy in which theyโre now exhibited.
The most perplexing works here involve a reconstruction of Nelsonโs studio in the front room of his terraced house, chock-full of artistic paraphernalia, which looks out onto other works in which concrete-cast heads hang within a lattice of welded rebar, and a chicken-wire enclosure of bizarre post-apocalyptic figures made from junk. With its gently self-mocking title โ weโll all be gone soon! โ Extinction Beckons is suffused with the sense of how fleeting an artistโs contribution is in the vastness of human history.