THE ART NEWSPAPER, No.

225, JUNE 2011

Features 55
Artist interview: Mike Nelson
' I ' m not quite sure what installation i s . . . "
His work at the Venice Biennale has meant rebuilding an installation inside a rebuilt caravanserai within the British Pavilion
By Louisa Buck
E
pic in scale and often highly disquiet-
ing in atmo.sphere, Mike Nelson's
meticulously-crafted environments
combine architecture, storytelling and
a slew of literary, artistic, historical
and cinematic references to conjure
up real and imagined places where most of us
would not nomially wish to linger. He first came to
widespread attention in 2(XX) with The Coral Reef,
a dingy warren of sinister rooms and passages
redolent with suggestions of transient communities
and dark doings which, although made before the
events of 9/11, seemed almost uncannily prescient
in its evocation of conspiracy and terror, and which
has now entered the Tate's pemianent collection.
In 2001, the year of his first nomination for the
Tumer Prize (he was shortlisted again in 2007),
Nelson made his first work in Venice, a fringe pro-
ject entitled The Deliverance and the Patience,
which immersed visitors in a labyrinthine 16-roc)m
extravaganza which took him over two months to
build on site. Now Nelson is back in an official
capacity as Britain's representative at the 2011
Venice Biennale, and has again been living in the
city for several months to construct /, Impostor, a
work described by the British Council as "one of
the most challenging solo presentations" ever to be
housed in its pavilion.
The Art Newspaper: You last showed in Venice a
decade ago, in a derelict brewery on the
Guidecca. Now you are in the genteel neoclassical
British Pavilion in the Giardiniquite a contrast!
Mike Nelson: The experience of doing something
here again is very much bound up with trying to
make sense of one's own history in relation to the
city and also the history of the city you are doing
it in. What I wanted to do was to make something
9 m Sometimes I feel ftustrated
that people want to read the
work on a more political or
agitprop level as opposed to
experiencing it as sculpture
that looked a bit more introspective both in terms
of the city but also on a subjective level in terms
of my personal historv.
I imagine that the weight of cuttural baggage in
Venice couid be both stimulating and daunting...
It's quite a difficult city to compete with. On my
second site visit I was thinking about my darkroom
pieces, but of course photographing Venice is
probably one of the most redundant gestures you
could ever makeit has almost had its soul sucked
out of it through continuous photographyso my
mind was drifting to other sites and places which
reminded me of Venice. Of course that's quite
difficult as there are not that many places which
have the same ambiance as Venice but the one
place that does to me is Istanbul, another city with
which I've had a constant relationship since my
late teens, I was there in 1987, then again in 1992,
in 2003 and in 2009. I'd already built a darkroom
for the 2(X)3 Istanbul Biennale in Byk Valide
Han, an enormous 17th-century caravanserai
[roadside inn|, but then I thought that maybe I
could rebuild that darkroom.
Doubles, duplicates and mirroring seem to be a
recurring theme in your worit.
Exactly. So I thought actually to rebuild another
eastem biennial, inside this supposedly westem
city, but which is actually more like an eastem city
in the west, worked on many levels. It's subjective
in terms of my own history but there is also a huge
historical component in terms of the Byzantine-
Ottoman relationship between the two cities. My
primary desire was to work on this relationship
between Istanbul and Venice and before I thought
of rebuilding the caravanserai I read an early book
by Orhan Pamuk called The White Castle, about a
Venetian who is captured by Turkish pirates and
then sold to the Caliph's astrologer who tums out
to be the mirror image of him, so in a sense my
idea of the mirror and the double within these two
cities was also informed by this book.
is what we are seeing in the pavilion an accurate
repiica of your 2003 work?
I'm not just rebuilding the darkroom, I' m
rebuilding the building around it as well! The
darkroom didn't take up all that much space, it
was only two small rooms, but the caravanserai
is an enormous building which has three court-
yards, dome structures and probably over 100
rooms full of artisan workshops. It was incredi-
bly elaborate but has been rebuilt and chopped
The Byk Valide Han (ieft), a 17th centuiy
caravanserai, was the site of Nelson's 2003
Istanbul Biennale project, Magazin
Biography
around: there's flat ceilings and concrete every-
where and things falling down as others are built,
and I'm rebuilding this building inside the pavil-
ion, so it's another building existing inside the
Giardini building. In the original piece you had
to find your way through this huddled communi-
ty of workers into the darkrooms, where the
building around you was documented in every
detail. All that is actually left from that 2003
show are these photographs.
So it can't be exactly as it was...
It's more like a memory of a building. Just to
rebuild something as a forensic kind ofthing I
don't think would really interest me so much.
There are elements from the actual building that
you'll notice in terms of the photographs, but
there are about five hundred photographs and
there's no way you could rebuild all that. There's
more a sense of this building being built out from
the photographs within the darkroom and even
the darkroom is now reconfigured.
The situation in the Middle East, and the worid at
large, has changed dramatically since you last
showed in Venice in 2001, and also since the
2003 Istanbul Biennaie. Inevitabiy, this work will
be seen in the current context.
One of the concerns when I was first thinking
about making this work was my legitimacy to be
using another culture, especially within something
as branded as the British Pavilion: because to all
Bom: l')67.t-oughbiirough
Education: 1986-90 Reading University;1992-93 Chelsea
.School of Art
Lives and woriu: London
Represented by: Matts Gallery (London); 30.1 Gallery
(Ne Wirk); Cialleria Franco Noero (Turin)
Exhibitions include: 2011 Venice Biennale; Singapore
Biennale 2009 late Triennial 2008 Statens Museum for
Kunst, Copenhagen; Creative Time. New York 2004
Modem Art Oxford; Sao Paulo Biennale 2003 liighih
Intemationai Istanbul Biennale 2002 Sydney Biennale;
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art. San Francisco
2001 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Venice
Biennale
intents the British Pavilion is now Turkish.
Hopefully my intentions aren't too misjudged and
that there is a strange legitimacy given by the
existence of the work in 2003, and my remaking
of that work using the relics which I had left over.
Without being didactic or prescriptive I'm just
saying that I think Turkey is a very curious coun-
try in relation to what is going on in the world at
the moment. The image of Atatrk (Mustafa
Kemal Atatrk, the first president of Turkey! natu-
rally occurs prominently throughout the work
because in 2()0.3 he was omnipresent in every
.shop, workshop and public building, especially in
Istanbul's older places like the caravanserai, in
much the same way as, say, Assad in Syria,
Gaddafi in Libya or Saddam Hussein in Iraq
before the war. But what's interesting to me is that
Atatrk wasn't installed or upheld by the west in
the same way but rose out of the embers of the
Ottoman Empire to become a brilliant general and
the sculariser of modem day Turkey. So he's a
very curious figure in terms of the Middle East
just as geographically Turkey has also always
been a curious place in relation to both the west
and the Middle East.
You are often described as an installation artist,
is this a terni you feel comfortable with?
I'm actually tiot quite sure what installation is, it
just seems to be a term that is bandied about.
Sometimes I feel frustrated that people want to
read the work on a more pwlitical or agitprop
level as opposed to exjjeriencing it as sculpture.
For me the narrative is more like a structure. It
has a physicality and a sculptural structure which
is like the prose in a novel and I'm as interested
in that physicality as much as anything else.
is it still important that you source the compo-
nents personally and physically make most of the
work yourseif?
Yes, that's the pleasure of it! As you get older and
there's more budget then obviously there are
more helpers, but I admit I'm pleased to have
been asked to do this project at this point in my
life becau.se I'm still of an age when 1 can realise
something on this scale physically.
How much leeway was there for the piece to evolve
as you made it, or was it all planned in advance?
The British Council didn't push me for a plan
and I was keen to avoid this because the way that
the building in Istanbul is configured is that over
the centuries it has been built, then it's fallen
down, then it's been rebuilt, mended, changed,
rebuilt and chopped up, and 1 thought if I copied it
too tightly then that aesthetic would be difficult to
replicate. That's the fun: trying different things out,
shifting walls, changing things as you go along,
that's the making of the sculpture-otherwise I
might as well get somebody else to build it!
www.britishcouncil.org/venicebiennale
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