British artist Mike Nelson has used Fruitmarket’s Warehouse as the machine room 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.
This work asks questions about photography and its validity or currency at present. 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 with the focus 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, capturing 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.
Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley 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.”
The exhibition which is also part of Edinburgh Art Festival , which runs from 7th-24th August, will be shown from 27th June till 5th October 2025.
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 