The disarticulated presentation mirrored the artist’s own idiosyncratic practice of disassembly, storage, and reinstallation: Rather than carefully preserve his site-specific installations in their entirety for acquisition (or destroy them after deinstallation), Nelson warehouses various of their parts haphazardly in storage locations around the UK (originally of economic necessity but in more recent years, presumably, by design, to enforce an ethic of bricolage). Whereas the earlier work transformed two rooms of a late-seventeenth-century Turkish han into a photographic darkroom filled with archival pictures of its own changing facade, the later piece re-created not only the darkroom but also architectural elements of the Büyük Valide Han inside the late-nineteenth-century British pavilion, carefully disorienting the categories of “East” and “West.” At the Hayward, Nelson had reduced I, IMPOSTOR to a barely recognizable kit of parts.
These were the disassembled, partially packaged-up components of I, IMPOSTOR, 2011, the celebrated installation Nelson created for the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale, itself a reworking and extension of MAGAZIN: Büyük Valide Han, 2003, the artist’s contribution to the Eighth Istanbul Biennial. As our eyes grew accustomed to the surroundings, we made out a range of objects propped against the walls or placed on rows of heavy-duty warehouse-style shelves: some wrought-iron gates, various sets of floorboards, an old desk fan. Photo: Matt Greenwood.įrom the entryway, we passed through a large, dimly lit chamber tinged with the distinctive but now outmoded red light of the photographic darkroom, a signature Nelsonian device. Background: Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed), 2004. View of “Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons,” 2023, Hayward Gallery, London.
Lovecraft-a work first realized in 1999 at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh-battering and scratching the gallery’s once pristine white walls, which seemed to have been attacked by some sharply clawed and heavily muscled creature.) For his contribution to the Hayward’s “Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture” in 2008, the artist restaged To the Memory of H. This detour knocked us off-balance from the get-go, disrupting our bodily expectations and de-structuring the gallery’s model of optimized “visitor flow.” (The effect was understated, however, compared with the lacerating violence that Nelson memorably dealt to the same institution more than a decade ago. Instead of entering the show through the Hayward’s main inner doors, we had to turn right, into what is traditionally a side gallery. Nelson’s exhibition tightly controlled the sequential unfolding of its various mise-en-scènes, directing its viewers along a specific but unexpected route. Instead, the artist remixed his greatest (and lesser) hits-works that were originally strongly associated with specific sites-while self-reflexively examining the practice of reinstallation that this approach entails. The exhibition avoided the traditional trappings of the mid-career survey: no vitrines featuring old installation shots, plans, or notebooks here. True to form, Nelson’s survey “Extinction Beckons” at the Hayward Gallery, organized by Yung Ma, was a deliberately off-kilter not-quite-retrospective that was highly self-conscious about its own position within our accelerating economic, social, and ecological crises.
The artist’s famously phantasmagoric production avoids didacticism while rousing us from our own ever more dysfunctional neoliberal dreamworld. His dense, material work reconfigures the discarded and the obsolete to produce naturalistic installations that subtly reveal their own artifice. OVER THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, Mike Nelson has expanded the avant-garde’s long ragpicking tradition. Installation view, Hayward Gallery, London, 2023. Mike Nelson, The Deliverance and The Patience, 2001, mixed media.
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