Mike Nelson review – a waking nightmare of derelict dunes and desert island despair

Entropy and hopelessness become thrillingly confrontational in this ambitious show, which recreates Nelson’s studio, shacks and sand dunes in dilapidated form

It’s either a cry for help or a scream into the void. Whichever it is, Mike Nelson’s latest exhibition is the English artist at his most frustrated, scared, introspective and personal. This is a show filled with rot and dilapidation, insanity and dereliction. It’s big, ambitious, immersive, complex and very, very good.

It’s not Nelson’s first time at Modern Art Oxford. He was last here in 2004, with a crumbling shack in the process of being swallowed by desert dunes. The shack is back, rebuilt in the same gallery, as if it never actually left – just temporarily blinked in and out of temporal existence. But it’s different now, more weathered, more broken. And that vast pile of sand is different too – you can see that it’s not a real dune, it’s a thin layer of sand held up on carpets and a rusted metal frame. The whole thing is an illusion. It always was, we just couldn’t see it.

He’s recreated his old studio in the first gallery too, but stripped of the ephemera and materials that make up an artist’s work space. Now it is largely empty, its shelves bare. A projector flips through slides of self-portraits next to a broken mirror and a human skull. Nelson is feeling pretty damn self-reflective, clearly.

And who can blame him? Returning to the site of an early major exhibition 22 years later he’s taking stock, asking what has changed. And the answer is not very much. When he first built that desert shack, it was back in the early days of the Iraq war. He was dealing with ideas of power, destruction and protest, and hoping desperately for change. Now in 2026, are things any better? We’ve got wars in Iran, Sudan, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, we’ve got madmen in power, we’ve got conspiracy theories being taken as gospel. All these years later, things have only got worse.

So now the shed has crumbled further into the desert, now it is littered with socialist party pamphlets and broken crucifixes. Now the foundations have been exposed and everything you believed in has been shown to be a lie.

So all you can really hope for is escape. In a side gallery, an invigilator locks you in a bedroom with a single metal cot and shelves lined with travel books. You can’t travel to Thailand or New Zealand from here but, in this filthy, miserable little room, you can dream about it, and that’s better than nothing. The last time I saw this work it felt claustrophobic and overbearing, as if I’d been imprisoned with only my thoughts and dreams of travel for company. This time, with all the dilapidation in the galleries outside, it feels like a sanctuary.

Nelson’s big into the idea of desert islands these days. There’s a photocopy of an introduction to a book about Robinson Crusoe pinned to a door, there are vast white sculptures that are half-skull, half-conch shell plonked around the place, as if Nelson is imagining isolation in tropical paradise as the only way out of this societal nightmare.

The spaces are connected by a rickety mining shaft which spits you out into a Lynchian cinema foyer, where most doors lead nowhere. Normally, Nelson shows feel like you’re stumbling across fragments of novels and trying to piece things together, but I’ve never seen him this clear and obvious and concise. Or this nakedly personal. Sure, the show is kinda like a Mike Nelson’s Greatest Hits compilation, but I think he’s looking back at his past, comparing it with his present, and feeling nothing but total, utter despair. It’s brutally affecting, and dizzyingly overblown. Cry for help or scream into the void, whichever it is, it’s miserably relatable.

• At Modern Art Oxford, 3 October to 11 April