Installation by two-time Turner prize nominee Mike Nelson plunges viewers into dusty Turkish caravanserai
It has taken the artist Mike Nelson 13 weeks, with a handful of helpers and a team of Moldovan builders, to transform the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale and make it completely unrecognisable, including giving the building several temporary domes on the roof.
Nelson‚ twice nominated for the Turner prize, never the winner, has finally been accorded that other mark of British artworld stardom: representing the UK at Venice, the largest, most established and still the most significant event in the international art calendar.
Nelson's already much talked-about installation, which opens to the public this Saturday, takes the visitor through the front door of the elegant, colonnaded 19th-century former tearoom that forms Britain's official pavilion and plunges them into a disorienting, dusty, crepuscular world full of labyrinthine passages, false walls and shoulder-hunchingly low ceilings.
The Venice Biennale – in which 89 countries, 12 more than in 2009, are officially competing for the Golden Lion for the best exhibition – is inescapably nationalist, and, as new countries join, including this year Iraq and Saudi Arabia, tends to reflect the tidal creep of geopolitics. Nelson, perhaps wisely, sidesteps the Olympian aspect of proceedings by having absolutely nothing to say about Britain or Britishness.
Instead, he has transformed the pavilion into a meticulously re-created version of a Turkish caravanserai, Istanbul's Büyük Valide Han. It was built in 1651 as a rest house for travellers, with storage and sleeping quarters built around a central courtyard. By the 21st century, the building had become a muddled but lively accretion of artisans' workshops, and in 2003 Nelson made an installation there for the Istanbul Biennale.
To re-create the space, Nelson spent 10 days sourcing materials, such as window-grilles and handmade doors, from Istanbul.
In many ways it is a characteristic work by Nelson – the visitor opens the door to the exhibition space and seems to slip into another world, with claustrophobic rooms apparently recently vacated by their former inhabitants. There is a chandelier-maker's workshop with a heap of glass baubles piled on a table; carpenters' tools lie on a workbench as if just put down; an improvised bed with rumpled blankets as if for a migrant worker; and there is a grubby little shower room with an extractor fan whirring away. Under the dome lie, says Nelson, the "debris of an old weaving loom".
Eschewing the idea of transforming the exterior of the building – as many artists do for the event, often working against the nationalist architecture of their pavilions, such as Russia's onion domes and the US's neoclassical mini-White House – Nelson likened the installation to a dodgy old paperback bound in smart hardcovers. "At first I was interested in doing something on the exterior of the building but that I decided it would be too theme-parkish," he said.
It is political, he said, only "with a small P" and he did not wish visitors to come away having immersed themselves in the complex histories he is investigating. "Art doesn't have to be read at the moment you visit it. It can have a drip effect," he said. He called the work "a large sculpture you can walk inside".
The Venice Biennale is both the tribal meeting place of the international art world, and the event that, more than any other, points the way to the future of contemporary art.
New participants include Andorra, the People's Republic of Bangladesh, and Haiti. Those returning after an extended absence include India, Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Cuba.
Each biennale also includes a large "international exhibition" sited in the Italian pavilion of Venice's Giardini and the city's disused arsenal. This year, the exhibition, Illuminations is curated by Bice Curiger, and includes work by British artists Ryan Gander and Haroon Mirza. As well as the pavilions in the Giardini, artists representing other countries not in competition are dotted throughout the city. Wales is represented by Tim Davies and Scotland by Karla Black.