The British installation is a convincing fictional world – but the best part is re-emerging into reality
Mike Nelson's work buries the British Pavilion at Venice and transfigures it, with grimy corridors, old doors from Istanbul junkyards, mouldering timber beams, the artist's familiar piles of junk. There are abandoned workshops and corners mired in filth.
The transformation is complete: we are elsewhere, between cultures and between times, in a wholly believable fictional reality. It is a mental as well as physical architecture. But whose place is this? Perhaps we are in a house shared by an artisan at the end of his days (and at the end of his tether), a local photographer who has lost the plot, endlessly re-photographing his run-down neighbourhood, and a character from one of Orphan Pamuk's historical novels. Who knows?
Nelson's work is as filled with unsifted layers of association as it is with the physical evidence of unlived lives. The artist (pictured right) has not only translocated and expanded a work he made for the Istanbul Biennale in 2003, but given us a prosaic ruin. We pass through room after room, discovering a pair of startling, domed top-lit spaces which it is hard to believe are not entirely real. But nothing is.
Even tracking through the be-grimed spaces with numerous other, well-dressed denizens of the international art world, all as intent on keeping their clothes clean as looking at the work, one passes through Nelson's labyrinth as if no other visitor has penetrated this forgotten place for decades. That's the magic of it.
But I tire of Nelson's endless dilapidation. It is the falsest thing about what he does, and ends up terribly mannered, a kind of modern picturesque. Nelson's repetitious inner world constantly consumes and regurgitates itself. Everything he has ever done is all of a piece. The best moment comes at the end, as you stumble into a courtyard surrounded by high walls and blind windows, exterior staircases leading nowhere, with a square of blue Venetian sky above. It's a relief.