Turner prize-winner's biggest show features free tea, graffiti and a recreation of the artist's bedroom
Sexually charged graffiti from the old British Library gents' toilets has still to be installed at the Hayward gallery, and the recreation of Jeremy Deller's adolescent bedroom is not as lived-in as it will be. Add to that dozens of other things to do prior to his biggest-ever show, and the artist himself seems remarkably calm: "I'm not calm. People say I am. You wouldn't want to know what's going on in my head."
The entire downstairs space of the gallery on London's South Bank was all hammering, drilling and beeping as crews finished installing the first major retrospective of Deller's work. It is a show made all the trickier because he is known for works that do not easily fit within the walls of a gallery.
"It is a challenge," said the Hayward's director, Ralph Rugoff. "We didn't want an exhibition which was all about archives and documents. Hopefully this show will have an element of carnival."
The exhibition, years in the planning, is a mid-career retrospective for the 45-year-old artist who came to much wider prominence when he won the Turner prize in 2004. It opens to the public on Wednesday.
The difficulties of a Deller show come from the type of work he does. He is known for pieces such as The Battle of Orgreave, in which he restaged the violent 1984 confrontation between striking miners and police; Acid Brass, when he asked the William Fairey brass band to perform a repertoire of acid house music; and It Is What It Is, which uses a bombed-out car from Baghdad to stimulate conversations about Iraq.
All of those works will be represented at the Hayward, but the first thing visitors will step into is a recreation of his bedroom from his parents' house, where he lived until he was 31. The bedroom was the place where Deller held his first exhibition when his mum and dad were on holiday in 1993, something they were unaware of until years later.
Deller said it was not weird being in the bedroom. "I suppose what's weird is being surrounded by all this very early work from 20 years ago." It includes work never properly exhibited – the photographs taken when Deller was just going round with his camera; fluorescent posters; business cards saying things such as: "Max Wall is not dead."
"It's work from a period when I didn't really know what I was doing, I was trying to find my way," he said.
Next to the bedroom is the small WC where notated graffiti from the old British Library will be displayed. "The toilets were just full of the most torrid, sexually frustrated graffiti, as well as graffiti where all these academics and intellectuals were trying to outdo each other. I wrote it all down and made a little book from it."
The show is called Joy in People and it will have real people – "yes, real, living people" – as part of the exhibits. That includes them reading quietly for four hours at a time in front of a wall painting which says I ❤ Melancholy, and, in another part of the show, guest experts with knowledge and experience of Iraq will talk to visitors.
There will also be volunteers dispensing free tea at a reconstruction of Valerie's cafe from Bury's covered market – one that Deller towed through Manchester three years ago. "There will be free tea, sitting down will be encouraged," he said.
There are also numerous posters, banners, slides, videos and a new work called Exodus which Deller shot in Texas, capturing the twilight flight of 20 million bats.
Rugoff said Deller had expanded the idea of what art is. "Jeremy is one of the pioneers of a group of artists who started working in a different way in the early 90s – working collaboratively, working with different kinds of social groups, making work which was not so much about making an object as creating a situation. They really pushed the idea of what could constitute a work of art."
Deller said the Hayward was a great space and he was extremely proud of the show, although he added anxiously: "I'll be prouder when it's up."
Jeremy Deller: Joy in People runs at the Hayward gallery, London, from 22 February to 13 May