Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons
Hayward Gallery, London, UK
22 Feb – 7 May 2023
I only discovered this exhibition more than a month after it had opened, and with its closing date approaching, I was determined not to miss it. As the first survey exhibition of Mike Nelson’s career, it represents a milestone for an artist who, in my view, is one of the most significant British practitioners working today. I previously wrote about his 2019 presentation at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries.
Extinction Beckons brings together major installations sourced from a range of earlier exhibitions, many of which are shown here for the first time since their original presentation. Rather than reconstruct past works, Nelson reimagines them—breaking them apart and recontextualising them to form new constellations.
Nelson draws heavily on science fiction as a narrative framework and deliberately loosens any tether to the real world. He combines architectural spaces that have no logical relationship to one another—structures that can exist in literature, film, or virtual reality, but not in physical space. Yet the level of detail within each construction creates an uncanny realism.
Built from materials salvaged from scrapyards, auctions, junk shops, and flea markets, these installations possess a disquieting, life-like quality in which past, present, and future coexist. They expose Nelson’s preoccupation with time as a fluid, unstable concept. While his abandoned-looking environments bear traces of former activity, their eerie atmosphere makes them feel like visions of a dystopian future.
The exhibition opens with a red, dimly lit space resembling a photographic darkroom, its shelves cluttered with the kinds of objects one might store in a garden shed. The lighting and mise-en-scène propel you into an alternative temporal dimension.
The next major installation is a large, wooden labyrinth, leading visitors from room to room through screeching doors, flickering lights, a telephone that never rings, and an ageing fan in motion. The disorientation is immediate. I felt a creeping anxiety as I moved through the corridors—partly due to my aversion to confined spaces, but also because it was unclear whether I was stepping into the past or witnessing a forewarning of an apocalyptic future.
Ascending the stairs, you enter a room filled with sand and burnt-out tyres, dominated by a half-buried shed containing a photographic lab bathed in red light. This work reinterprets American artist Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Nelson produced his version during the Iraq War, substituting Smithson’s earth with sand and adding oil barrels to evoke a Middle Eastern landscape—a science-fiction vision of collapse and aftermath.
Another room features elements previously shown in The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain, Nelson’s exploration of the decline of the UK’s manufacturing industry and the impact of mass deindustrialisation. His sculptural assemblages allude to industrial processes; the objects shift between relic, sculpture, and machine, acquiring a mysterious presence that invites renewed scrutiny. I include here his new iteration of Magical Thinking and Twisted Logic…, alongside the version we encountered at Tate Britain with The Art Blackberry.
The art blueberry interacting with Mike Nelson’s installation ‘Magical thinking and twisted logic…’.
Across references to science fiction, failed political movements, countercultures, dark histories, capitalism, colonialism, war, and environmental degradation, Nelson opens windows onto alternative ways of thinking and living in a homogenised global landscape. His literary influences include William Burroughs, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, J.G. Ballard, and Stanislaw Lem.
The sequence of installations recreated for this survey immerses the visitor in a psychologically charged environment that disorients and encloses. Nelson’s work is emotionally potent and deeply unsettling, yet it provides an invaluable glimpse into the artist’s complex conceptual universe.
The little art gooseberry interacting with Mike Nelson’s installation at the Hayward gallery.
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