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"I don’t think people know what I do that much," Mike Nelson tells me when I meet him at his South London home. "And my practice doesn’t really help the understanding of itself by being so labor-intensive and specific to certain spaces." At a time when artists’ works are most often seen in and sold from digital pictures, installation is perhaps the last artistic mode to require first-hand experience, remaining true to the old-fashioned idea that art demands a physical encounter to be fully appreciated. No photograph can accurately convey what it feels like to discover a space or, as in most of Nelson’s carefully staged environments, get lost in a labyrinth of rooms. You have to be there or else rely on the memories of others who were.

That’s a blessing and a curse. Working with installation demands concentration from viewers, but it also seriously limits a piece’s diffusion — and thus its creator’s visibility. Nelson, who will represent Britain at this year’s Venice Biennale, is aware of the difficulty, and his career may have been slowed by a resolute commitment to his chosen practice. He isn’t as well known as his contemporaries Martin Creed, Steve McQueen, and Chris Ofili, and yet he has produced some of the most significant pieces of installation art of the past decade. Nelson’s environments have something of Paul Thek’s spectacularism and Ed Kienholz’s doldrums, often outdoing in intensity the work of those artists, whom he cites as influences. In "Coral Reef," 2000, on view at Tate Britain until the end of the year, he crowded a mazelike structure with the signifiers of different "belief systems": a fake art-gallery reception area, drug paraphernalia, and the contents of a Muslim minicab office. It was created a year before 9/11, at a time when, he explains in a Tate video, "Islam seemed like a very disempowered belief structure, in a position that somehow couldn’t be heard." On its first showing, in 2000 at Matt’s Gallery, in London, the piece received much critical attention. Nelson was nominated for the Turner Prize that year and again in 2007, but he failed to win on either occasion. Official recognition has been a long time coming.

View Slideshow: Space Invader

The 2011 Venice Biennale won’t be Nelson’s first. For the 2001 edition the British nonprofit arts organization Peer commissioned him to produce a piece in a disused brewery on La Giudecca Island. "The Deliverance and the Patience," named after two 18th-century galleons built by a community of shipwreck survivors hoping to reach the shores of America, referred, as art historian Claire Bishop wrote in her book "Installation Art," "to utopian communities, colonization, and the origin of capitalism," but it also clearly responded to Venice’s glorious past as a key stop on the trade route to the East. The installation comprised 16 rooms, including an old-fashioned travel agent’s office, a space carpeted with Oriental rugs (prayer room? opium den?), and a chapel-like nook complete with skull-adorned altar. Shoes, clothes, even a suitcase cropped up in various places. "As in all of Mike’s works," remembers Peer director Ingrid Swenson, "you felt really self-conscious, as if you were somewhere you shouldn’t be."

Nelson’s installations are saturated with the presence of their fictional inhabitants. This is a crucial part of their appeal: Viewers are intruders, excited by their transgression, worried that the legitimate occupants might come back. The level of detail the artist achieves triggers an almost automatic suspension of disbelief. Being in one of his pieces is as immersive as watching a film or reading a book. You know it’s fabricated but can’t help feeling unsettled. Ilya Kabakov, the father of installation art, used to refer to viewers as actors patrolling his theatrical sets. In Nelson’s environments they are actor-prisoners, ensnared in a narrative they don’t fully understand and responding emotionally to stimuli laid out for them by the artist-director like so many traps.

"The fact that Nelson has already shown in Venice was a consideration when we selected him," says Richard Riley, exhibition curator at the British Council (the organization responsible for the British Pavilion). "Mike knows that he has to address the fact that he has a history with Venice." During our conversation, the artist admits to finding the city quite frustrating. "But I think my interests will stay true to what they’ve always been," he adds. "The new piece will probably touch upon what the last piece was interested in: the history of Venice as a Byzantine city and the fact that it’s the end of a trade route. It’s incredibly evocative in that sense."

The East-West relationship has been a recurrent interest of his since art school. Born in Leicestershire in 1967, Nelson spent very little time abroad during his youth. When he went to Turkey in 1987, traveling to the border with Iran, "it was a revelation," he recalls, "confusing but also kind of frightening — intoxicating." Several trips followed, including to Morocco, Egypt, and Pakistan. It was the heyday of postcolonial theory, "something I was very interested in," Nelson says. "But I also felt very frustrated because, at the time, there was a heavy sense of exclusion of those who weren’t from those countries to talk about these situations. Now there is a freeing of the ownership of a certain voice, because ultimately it is incredibly important territory and something that should be discussed from both perspectives."

There are countless references to the other in Nelson’s work. In "Studio Apparatus Camden," 1998, shown last January at Camden Arts Centre, a wall-hung photocopy of an introduction to Jules Verne’s "Mysterious Island", combined with loose pages from the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey, positioned today’s backpacker as heir to the Victorian explorers. In the background, an alluring mountain was built from a folded carpet. "There’s an element of me that enjoys the exotic," says Nelson. "It’s complicated because its political ramifications are problematic." The artist’s use of Middle Eastern signifiers — a Red Crescent medical bus in "The Pumpkin Palace," 2003, Arabic inscriptions in "Coral Reef," patterned rugs in "The Deliverance and the Patience" — seems designed both to highlight culturally ingrained clichés and to return them to the realm of imagination.

Since 9/11, Nelson has been much more sporadic in his references to Muslim countries — at least until recently. The four conjoined house trailers of his installation "Quiver of Arrows," 2010, shown last year at New York’s 303 Gallery, contained an Oriental carpet and a seating area with a selection of "calls to the mosque" tapes. Here these elements appeared partly freed from the exoticism associated with similar objects in Nelson’s previous pieces. "In recent years the saturation of imagery from the Middle East and the omnipresence of Arabic text in the media have rendered them almost impotent," the artist explains. "Our sense of the other, of the unknown and its potential for the imaginings of both good and bad, is being diminished." The appeal of Nelson’s installations remains.

"Space Invader" originally appeared in the April 2011 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2011 Table of Contents.