Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated)
Project description
Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) is a video installation by British artist Abigail Lane, whose practice occupies the unsettling territory between the grotesque and the theatrical. Through fragmented bodies, traces, impressions and ephemeral images, Lane explores absence, memory, mortality and the psychological spaces that exist between physical presence and disappearance.
A founding figure associated with the Young British Artists, Lane emerged from Goldsmiths College and participated in Freeze, the seminal 1988 exhibition curated by Damien Hirst. Her practice draws on diverse sources including Victorian spectacle, medical history, magic, circus and popular entertainment, transforming these references into installations that combine dark humour with psychological unease.
Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) marked a movement from Lane’s earlier engagement with physical traces and bodily fragments towards more explicitly psychological spaces. The exhibition comprised three video installations: The Figment, The Inclination and The Inspirator. Each work evokes a different aspect of the psyche, moving between instinct, desire, memory and imagination.
The theatrical character of the works is heightened through lighting, sound and surreal imagery. Rather than presenting fixed narratives, the three installations create ambiguous psychological environments in which images and sensations appear and disappear, leaving the viewer suspended between recognition and uncertainty.
Lane’s work consistently resists definitive interpretation. Whether working with bodily impressions, fragmented forms or projected images, she explores the unstable boundary between what is visible and what is sensed. Her installations operate as haunted spaces in which absence becomes a physical and psychological presence.
Bio
Abigail Lane (b. 1967, Oxford, UK) is a British contemporary artist whose practice encompasses installation, sculpture, photography, drawing and video. Her work explores the body, mortality, memory and the uncanny, often combining forensic imagery, theatrical devices and traces of human presence.
Lane studied at Goldsmiths College and participated in Freeze in 1988, the exhibition organised by Damien Hirst that became an important early presentation of the emerging Young British Artists. She has exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Britain, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Victoria Miro Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Recent exhibitions include Heads and Tails at The Art Station, Suffolk (2023), her first solo exhibition in twenty years; Doing Time at Semiose, Paris (2024); A Change of Scenery at Neues Museum Nürnberg (2024); and Works from the Colección Jumex at Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2025). Her work has also been presented at Firstsite, Colchester, in Big Women (2023) and at MAC VAL, Paris, in le fait divers: une hypothèse en 26 lettres, 5 équations et aucune réponse (2024–2025).
Project details
Year: 2001
Artist: Abigail Lane
Exhibition: Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated)
Works: The Figment; The Inclination; The Inspirator
Commissioned and produced by: Milton Keynes Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella
Subsequent presentation: Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Format: Three-channel video installation
Country: United Kingdom