Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons

“My intent has always been to make immersive works. They should have a narrative, a spatial aspect, but also a psychological effect on the senses: you’re seeing and feeling one thing whilst your brain is trying to override this and tell you something else.” —Mike Nelson

Throughout his career, Mike Nelson has scavenged materials and objects from reclamation yards, car boot sales and charity shops to build expansive, atmospheric installations that transport us. He has transformed decommissioned relics of industry into large, striking sculptures and made memorial-like works from sleeping bags and rubble. This exhibition brings together a selection of these works from the past three decades, reimagined and reconfigured for the spaces of the Hayward Gallery. 

The highly detailed installations that Nelson builds are uncanny—speculative representations straddle the line between real and fictional worlds. The various objects and built elements in these works convey a lively sense of disorderliness, enveloping and haunting us with intimations of absent characters. In the ruggedness of their materiality as well as in their range of references, they suggest the possibility of violence, disaster and societal decay. 

Together, these characteristics encourage us to actively look for clues and to seek connections between the many details that we encounter and explore. They also invite—indeed compel—us to experience feelings of ambiguity, eeriness, suspense and disorientation. In Nelson’s constructed realities, time is an otherworldly concept and truth is an unreliable beast. 

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Extinction Beckons Exhibition Supporters Group: 303 Gallery, New York; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; and those who wish to remain anonymous. The catalogue and public programme is supported by Kingston School of Art, Kingston University.