ghosts, trauma & superman: mike kelley's radical art at tate modern

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at tate modern

Exhibiting at Tate Modern, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is an immersive exhibition that showcases the late American artist’s prolific career, exploring his childhood, mental struggles, and fascination with memory and trauma. The show includes a vast array of videos, sculptures, collages, drawings, and multimedia installations that evoke unsettling, personal themes such as alienation, childhood innocence lost, and haunted memories. At a higher level, his radical works question the systems of belief and institutional structures that shape our societal roles. Spanning Mike Kelley‘s entire career, this is the first major UK retrospective show launched in honor of the artist and marks a rare opportunity for new audiences to discover the elaborate, provocative, and imaginative worlds he created, which continue to resonate over a decade after his passing in 2012.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view featuring ‘More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin’ 1987 | image © Tate / Lucy Green

examining memory, trauma, childhood innocence, and more

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at the Tate Modern (see more here) is anchored by a script from the artist’s archive, Under a Sheet/Existance Problems, exploring the idea of the ghost which disappears whilst the spirit lingers. These ideas point to the themes of absence and identity, influenced by his Catholic upbringing. The exhibition opens with his early works from CalArts (1976–78), including The Poltergeist (1979), a collaboration with David Askevold. This haunting photographic series depicts Mike Kelley mimicking early 20th-century spiritualist photography, emitting ethereal substances, embodying Kelley’s ongoing exploration of the supernatural.

Mike Kelley at Tate Modern, installation view, ‘Monkey Island’ project | image © Tate / Lucy Green

The exhibition also features Mike Kelley’s influential early installations like Monkey Island (1982–83) and Half a Man (1987–91), where he introduced craft objects as a form of resistance to modernist art. By incorporating stuffed toys and crocheted afghans, Kelley explored the uncanny, turning innocent children’s items into complex commentaries on gender and familial power structures. Worn and often grubby second-hand toys are worked into colorful and playful arrangements like More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and Ahh…Youth! photographs 1991. Alongside his later use of audio tapes with spoken text from his Dialogue series, these productions evoke a contrast between childhood innocence and darker underlying themes.

Mike Kelley, Kandor 16B, 2010 | © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts | VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024 | image © Fredrik Nilsen

In the mid-1990s, Mike Kelley decided to build on the public fascination with the confessional narrative and how this relates to various forms of belief systems, including conspiracy theories. Central to this exploration was the role of memory in how we construct and understand the world around us. A slideshow of images represents the major work Educational Complex 1995, a large sculptural model of every place where the artist had been educated. The influence of this monumental project is explored through the associated works Sublevel 1998, based upon the basement of CalArts, where he had studied in the 1970s, and Relationships Rendered as Fluid 2002 – two hanging mobiles and their associated drawings, which play on the relationship of architectural space to memory.

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit culminates with Kelley’s late installations, particularly from the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000–2011), where the artist restaged high school yearbook images as video installations. These works examine how people use social activities to escape everyday life. A key highlight is Kelley’s Kandors series (1999–2011), featuring illuminated models of Superman’s home city preserved in glass jars. These installations evoke a ghostly cityscape, reflecting themes of loss, memory, and psychological depth. The exhibition is on view at the Tate Modern between October 3rd, 2024, to March 9th, 2025.