Reconstructions: a Room for Mike Kelley

Mary McIntyre and Robert Anderson are showing Reconstructions: a Room for Mike Kelley at The MAC, and it's running until Sunday 18 October. It's a bit of a strange one to wrap your head around: the two Belfast artists have spent ten years working from the few existing photographs of American artist Mike Kelley's early performances, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, painstakingly reconstructing the studio environments and sculptural objects he used. They then photograph those reconstructions to produce new works. So what you're seeing isn't Kelley's original stuff, but a careful, decade-long attempt to bring it back into the room.

On display are versions of Kelley's idiosyncratic wooden props, like birdhouses with perspectively skewed proportions and a cartoonish bullhorn he called a 'perspectaphone'. Alongside them are photographs of the gymnasium-like spaces in which they were used, and a room built entirely of plywood. There are no performances staged here; you just wander through the rooms guided by your own imagination, and the meaning shifts depending on your own status, cultural context, or personal experience. It's an exhibition that asks you to fill in the gaps.

Kelley, who died by suicide in 2012, left a body of work defined by playfulness and pathos across sculpture, video, and installation. This show follows several posthumous exhibitions, including the 2023-25 touring retrospective Ghost and Spirit. If you're familiar with his work, this is a chance to see those early, ephemeral performances given a second life; if you aren't, it's a good way to get a feel for the kind of things he was doing long before he became a major name. It's at The MAC in Belfast until Sunday 18 October.