Exhibition: Hayward Gallery presents Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons

From February 22 – May 7, 2023, the Hayward Gallery will present Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, the first major survey exhibition of large-scale immersive installations and sculptural works by the internationally acclaimed British artist.

Nelson’s psychologically charged and atmospheric installations take viewers on enthralling journeys into fictional worlds that eerily echo our own.

Designed to dramatically transform the spaces of the Hayward Gallery, his exhibition will include towering sculptural works and new versions of his key epic installations, many of which will be shown at the Hayward Gallery for the first time since their original presentations.

Mike Nelson said: “My intent has always been to make immersive works that operate on multiple levels.

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: Extinction Beckons features ambitious reincarnations of key installations in Nelson’s body of works, including The Deliverance and the Patience, Triple Bluff Canyon and Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster – each remembered and reconfigured for the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

Constructed with materials scavenged from salvage yards, junk shops, auctions and flea markets, Nelson’s immersive installations have a startling life-like quality.

Weaving references to science fiction, failed political movements, dark histories and countercultures, they touch on alternative ways of living and thinking: lost belief systems, interrupted histories and cultures that resist inclusion in an increasingly homogenised and globalised world.

Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, saids: “Mike Nelson’s installations are ‘interactive’ in the very best sense: through potent arrangements of culturally and psychologically charged props and architectural structures, they prompt each viewer to imagine a story that makes sense of the scene before them.

“Though his installations sometimes physically enclose us, their open-ended narratives beckon to a seemingly endless play of possibilities – even as they conjure bleak scenarios evocative of the fringes and margins of society.”

Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre, 1998 Picture: Mike Nelson