HOST PAVILION/GUEST HOUSE/HAN

A catalogue essay commissioned by the British Council. Published in the British Council catalogue accompanying artist Mike Nelson’s representation of the UK in the British Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The essay constitutes an experimental critical text that incorporates interview material whilst setting out a new critical perspective on the artist’s practice. It relates the formal attributes, mythological references and self-reflexivity in Nelson’s work to histories of sculpture in the ‘expanded field’ and critical investigations of the ambiguities of the host/guest relationship, in particular that of Michel Serres. Thus, it modifies the implicitly negative label of escapist “immersion” usually applied to Nelson’s installations and asks that his work’s analytical dimensions be given more careful consideration.