Hayward Gallery, London
Nothing is as it seems as the Hayward is turned into a series of ill-lit labyrinths where it is hard to tell the incidental from the crucial
You don’t enter by the usual door or take a familiar route around in Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons at the Hayward. This adds to the derangement of a show in which we scurry through ill-lit and dismal labyrinths of small rooms and dingy corridors, and then find ourselves confronted by the glare of an indoor desert, where a broken-backed shack sits half-buried in a sand dune strewn with shredded car tyres and abandoned oil drums. The interior of the shack feels like the show’s epicentre, a final redoubt. Later we find ourselves looking into a recreation of Nelson’s studio in the 1990s, and wander the perimeter of a skeletal cuboid cage, fashioned from rebar, in which concrete human heads, clownish masks, and grim and gurning gargoyles are strewn about and hang from metal grilles. Are they human trophies, misformed effigies from an unknown belief system or secret cult? Whatever I write feels like a spoiler.
We enter through a kind of storage facility, piled high with stuff on shelving racks and leant against walls, embalmed in plastic sheeting and spilling out of boxes. All cast in a grim and dirty red glow, like a photographic dark room or a goth club. Already we are in a time-lagged alternative dimension. We haven’t even met Nelson’s spectral biker gang yet, or the ranting con-artist conspiracy theorist. We’ve not disappeared into the go-downs, with their dodgy companies and free-zone offices. As soon as you are out, an old wooden door beckons, and we’re plunged into a further warren of interconnecting rooms. Take a left, do a right. Door after door, room after room. Lights flicker, an old table fan sweeps dead air in an empty office, a phone doesn’t ring and there’s no one there. This is familiar Nelson territory. Have I been here before? Most likely.
