![]() ![]() The Deliverance and the Patience, 2001 (detail). A musty smell pervades the work, the tang of objects collected from skips and car boot sales. The surfaces are worn, some of the walls are bashed in, the furniture is manky. Beyond is a gambling den and a poky travel agency with yellowing posters of passenger planes. Scraps of fabric cover a work bench in what appears to be a sweatshop. Elsewhere rumpled sleeping bags lie on a patched-up camp bed. There are two cramped bars, one decorated with tacky maritime paraphernalia, the other with old countercultural symbols: an image of Elvis, a picture of a hemp leaf. One room, its walls painted lurid shades of blue and purple, contains an old chest that doubles as a multi-faith altar, with various ceremonial objects – animal skulls, a small buddha, pseudo-Egyptian busts – arranged on top of it. Like his cult piece Coral Reef (2000), it consists of a bewildering network of dingy rooms and twisting corridors. Nelson originally made his name with maze-like immersive installations such as The Deliverance and The Patience, which was mounted in a derelict brewery in Venice in 2001 and has now been recreated for an ambitious survey of his work at London’s Hayward Gallery, on view until 7 May. Though absorbing and at times witty, their depiction of today’s world is unflinchingly bleak. But while Greene’s story is strangely upbeat, Nelson’s installations are grim. In a similar fashion, the British artist Mike Nelson equates the exploration of interiors with larger travels in time and space. A year later, he dies ‘on his travels’ – dragging his suitcase to the last of his fifty-two rooms. After suffering a stroke in Venice at the beginning of his tour, he buys a crumbling Italian villa, where he resumes his journey on a different scale, moving weekly from one bedroom to another. In Travels with My Aunt, Graham Greene tells the story of a man who decides to travel the world as he believes it will ‘make time move with less rapidity’. ![]()
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