Extinction Beckons - (Hayward Gallery, 2023)
If humanity were to vanish, given a long enough time during which our influence on the planet will be covered up by overgrown vegetation and thriving wildlife, the only trace of our existence will be the footsteps of the astronauts who walked on the moon.
Mike Nelson’s survey exhibition at the Hayward Gallery called ‘Extinction Beckons’, which ran from the 22nd of February till the 7th of May 2023, presents the exact moment after our disappearance. The diminishing warmth of life and the detritus left by a vanished population throughout this exhibition makes one imagine the kind of people who exist at the end of recordable history.
Upon entering this parallel universe, you find yourself in… a storage unit. There’s a cornucopia of junk leaning against the wall and populating the rows of industrial shelves. What can’t be accounted for is the deep red light which is splattered like a bloodbath on every surface. Immovable wooden doors, wrought iron gates, cluttered boxes, slabs wrapped in plastic, all of them along with the floor, walls, and ceiling are bathed in this ancient bloody light. Your presence in this sarcophagus disturbs the primordial dust that lays over all these items.
The name of the artwork, ‘I, IMPOSTER’ doesn’t only hark back to Nelson’s installation of the same name from the 2011 Venice Biennale, it is the same installation! An entire Istanbul tenement building which he built then by salvaging materials from landfills, flea markets, and auctions is here, collapsed, packed up, and shelved. This room represents the fate of not just this but every exhibition out there; cold, dark storage. Audiences only see the prime of an artwork’s life, never the birth or death. In this room, you’re paying respects at the grave of an artwork, seeing beyond the life of art. No wonder Nelson uses the term “reincarnation” to describe his appropriation of previous works.
If the previous room represents the disassembled matter which makes an artwork, the next room rearranges that matter into a completed work. And just like the previous one, this room is an exercise in high-function hoarding. ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’, another past work from the 2001 Venice Biennale sits like a titanic, barge-shaped anomaly in the gallery here.
You enter through a small door and find yourself in a dingy little hallway with a door on either side. Both doors will thrust you into a perplexing wander through rooms from different dubious realities. An African travel agent’s office, a room where a roulette game abruptly ended, a drinking den of a ship’s captain, an occult shrine, a prayer room, these are but some of the many rooms which have been jettisoned from their original realities to drift through time and space for them to collide into each other and form this labyrinth which tries to lure the unwitting wanderer into its desperation.
These rooms didn’t leave their scents in their native realities as each one bears the musk of sweat, mould, stale air, and fear. Things seem strewn about as if habitation was instantly abandoned. The floorboards creak under your weight and the squeaking and slamming of doors shoot from one end to the other. You’ll encounter a door which leads you up some steps to reveal pile upon pile of more junk. Chairs, ceiling fans, tables, traffic cones, and incalculable types of debris threaten to cave into the labyrinth. With the knowledge of what’s above, every creak of the floorboard feels doubly disconcerting.
Where the dense air in the previous room made it difficult to breathe, you now find yourself in a barren expanse where the air molecules are too far apart to even interact. The air is arrested under the scorching desert sunlight, which turns out to be a blinding ceiling lamp. You see a woodshed half-buried under a sand dune with blown-out rubber types sticking out of the surrounding sand. An irresistible curiosity pulls you towards it despite its foreboding aura. Your voice sounds blunted as it’s smothered by the heaps of sand that stop just before your feet. Through a tunnel, you enter the woodshed to find a photographic darkroom with more of that ancient red light from the first room. Hanging from the ceiling are developing photographs while underneath on the table are development impedimenta. The images depict the creation of this installation, ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’, and how all this sand was deposited atop this derelict shed. Another previous piece of Nelson’s, this one has been updated, with the darkroom relocated straight out of 2011’s ‘I, IMPOSTER’, and rubber tyres salvaged off the M25 added to the sand. Not just a reincarnation of his old work, it’s also a homage to Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ (1970).
Finally, you descend some stairs and are encountered by the skeleton of a building. Within the rebar mesh are concrete heads impaled upon the beams. Perhaps as symbols for the death toll of exploitative construction labour, these heads bear severe expressions. Deep inside this reinforced steel skeleton is Nelson’s natural habitat, a Georgian living room studio where on a long table is littered an array of tools, books, and more junk…
When you leave the exhibition and emerge into the open, you’ll feel disoriented. Nelson’s immersive works construct a universe so tactile and compelling that it invades the gallery, turning it into reality rather than a suspension of it. This explains the oneiric quality of his installations. His works feel like fragmentary and uncanny false memories, emerging from somewhere between dreams and forgetfulness. Which further reinforces the ambiguity of his works. Most contemporary art exhibitions require an understanding of the word-salad contextual statement and the artist’s background before the artwork can be felt. Whereas feeling and experience come before analysis in Extinction Beckons. The title of the exhibition doesn’t refer to one single extinction event but many possible ones. By presenting the ending, Nelson leaves it entirely up to the audience to conjure the story which led to it.
