Mike Nelson

Mike Nelson (born in 1967, lives and works in London) continues a serial work initiated in 1998 at Camden Arts Centre (London), and continued at the Mamco (Geneva) in 2005. The artist occupies what he has referred to as a “studio apparatus,” constructing a work which exists somewhere between exhibition and workshop. Nelson sees it as a creative space in which former objects and materials, as well as ideas, are preserved and re-articulated, a mechanism of sorts to predict the future of his own making.  The piece proposed for “Inside” will be echoed with another work created concurrently at the Kunsthalle Münster. Each “apparatus” uses as a starting point an introduction to the book School for Crusoes, in which Jules Verne parodies his favorite genre of the “Mysterious Island”. Nelson uses these ideas of parody, as well as the motif of the island and the now clichéd scenario of its inhabitant, to conceptually construct the piece. The visitor is invited to enter into the psyche of the artist at a particular moment, between his past and future, an elusive chimera that one could consider as the present.