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 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.
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.
Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Director
Mike Nelson 27th June – 5th October 2025, Fruitmarket
Open daily 11am–6pm
About the artist
Born in Loughborough (UK) in 1967, Mike Nelson lives and works in London. His work has centred on the transformation of narrative structure to spatial structure, and on the objects placed within them, immersing the viewer and agitating their perception of these environments. The narratives employed by the artist are not teleological but multi-layered, and often fractured to the extent that they could be described as a semblance of ‘atmospheres’ put together to give a sense of meaning. The more discrete sculptural works are informed by this practice, often relying on their ambiguity to fade in and out of focus, as a sculpture or thing of meaning, and back to the very objects or material from which they are made. By working in this way the more overtly political aspects of the early works have become less didactic, allowing for an ambiguity of meaning, both in the way that they are experienced and understood. This has led to the possibility of the viewer being coerced into a state where the understanding of the varied structures of their existence, both conscious and sub-conscious, are made tangible. Nelson represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize (2001 & 2007). His critically-acclaimed survey show, Extinction Beckons, at Hayward Gallery (2023) included sculptural works and new versions of key large-scale installations from the 1990s onwards, many shown for the first time since their original presentations.
Solo exhibitions and projects include: Extinction Beckons, Hayward Gallery, London (2023); The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction), Matt’s Gallery, London (2022); The House of the Farmer, Palazzo dell’agricoltore, Parma (2021); The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain Commission, London (2019); L’Atteso, Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR), Turin (2018); Cloak of rags (Tale of a dismembered bank, rendered in blue), Galleria Franco Noero, Turin (2017); tools that see (possessions of a thief) 1985-2005, neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2016); Cloak, Noveau Musee National de Monaco (2016); Imperfect geometry for a concrete quarry, Kalkbrottet, Malmö (2016); Amnesiac Shrine or The Misplacement…, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2016); Gang of Seven, 303 Gallery, New York (2015); Studio apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster, Kunsthalle Münster (2014); Eighty Circles through Canada, Tramway, Glasgow (2014); Amnesiac Hide, The Powerplant, Toronto (2014) and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013); More things (To the memory of Honoré de Balzac), Matt’s Gallery, London (2013); M6, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2013); space that saw (platform for a performance in two parts) neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2012); 408 tons of imperfect geometry, Malmö Konsthall (2012); I, IMPOSTOR, British Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Quiver of Arrows, 303 Gallery, New York (2010); A Psychic Vacuum, Creative Time, New York (2007); AMNESIAC SHRINE or Double coop displacement, Matt’s Gallery, London (2006); Triple Bluff Canyon, Modern Art Oxford (2004); Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted. ICA, London (2001); The Deliverance and The Patience, a PEER Commission for the Venice Biennale (2001); and The Coral Reef, Matt’s Gallery, London (2000).
Group exhibitions include: Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana (2024); 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021); MaytoDay, Gwangju (2020); 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); 250th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018); Wanderlust, the High Line, New York (2016); 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); INSIDE, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); September 11, MoMA PS1, New York (2011); Singapore Biennale (2011); Altermodern, Tate Britain, London (2009); Psycho Buildings, Hayward Gallery, London (2008); Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2008); Reality Check, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2008); Turner Prize, Tate Liverpool (2007); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2006); and Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (2001).
Mike Nelson is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt’s Gallery, London; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
