The inimitable Mike Nelson has a special installation at the Fruitmarket giving UK audiences the rare chance to view the work of this profound artist. Crossing the boundaries of studio creation and reproduction, Nelson’s work asks questions of media, image, symbolic ontology, being and obsolesce. Can images become obsolete? Or are art and imagery of eternal currency?
Exhibition notes:
British artist Mike Nelson has used Fruitmarket’s Warehouse as the machine room or driving force for this major new installation that extends across all three spaces of Fruitmarket. Turning the Warehouse into his studio since the start of May, he has transformed it into both a site of production and part of the setting for his work.
The work will be shown 27.06.25–05.10.25. The exhibition is also part of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) which runs 7-24 August.
The work in the exhibition asks questions about photography and its validity or currency at present. In the early 2000s a major shift was taking place from analogue to digital photography. The world we live in now has shifted still further, with digital images that are ubiquitous, highly portable and endlessly accumulating in cloud storage. These shifts have rendered the position of photography within the artistic canon questionable. Playing with scale and our physical relation to it, Nelson attempts to investigate the possibility of bearing witness, of recording the swept away, the hidden and the covered up. In its focus on equipment deemed recently obsolete, the exhibition recalls and echoes earlier work of Nelson’s, such as the darkrooms with developing baths and photos of the rooms and corridors of a working caravanserai in Istanbul hung up to dry in MAGAZIN (Büyük Valide Han), made for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, and The Asset Strippers, his Tate Britain Duveen commission from 2019, in which he made monumental sculptures from industrial and agricultural machinery sold off at auction by company liquidators. However now the focus is far more orientated towards the image and our reaction to it – both emotionally and critically.
The period around 2010–2014 are the years in focus, in a reassessment of the artist’s own life and work, but also the political events of that time and the people directly affected by them. The work is built around two sets of images: one taken in London that concerns social housing in Britain; and the other of a city in the East of Turkey. Both sets recall a moment of transition – one of demolition, the other of reconstruction. They capture cities in flux, guided by their politics and the leaders of the time, with the work seeking to make some sort of sense of both sites and their inter-relatedness.
The exhibition will aim to communicate the ideas contained within the images through constructed environments, sculpture and photography. It hopes to encourage a visceral empathetic understanding of the two sites and the lives lived there whilst circumnavigating the criticality of their varying histories and current day relevance.
Photo: Muammer Yanmaz
Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Director said:
In a sense this exhibition, though it consists entirely of new work made in and for Fruitmarket, has been at least 17 years in the making. Mike has a long and deep history with Edinburgh. In 1994 he tore Collective Gallery apart with the memorable To the Memory of HP Lovecraft; he was a Sculpture Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art between 1998 and 2008; in 2004 his Pumpkin Palace was parked on a derelict site opposite Fruitmarket; and for Untitled No. 22 (High Plains Drifter) in 2008 he painted one of our fire escapes and the entire contents of a store cupboard red to create a disorientating, breath-taking new environment as part of the group exhibition Print the Legend.
This present project is the realisation of a long series of conversations about how Mike’s singular political and material vision can best engage with Fruitmarket and our audiences, and we are privileged to have this major new work by one of Britain’s finest international artists unfold in our space.
Mike Nelson
27.06.25–05.10.25
Open daily 11am–6pm.
Fruitmarket, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
