A conversation between Canadian artist Stan Douglas and Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley.

Stan Douglas is known for films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema, TV and photography, the conventions of various Hollywood genres, and classic literary texts to examine the intersection of history and memory in evocative, mesmerising artworks.

In 2014, when this conversation was recorded, Fruitmarket presented a selection of Douglas’s films and photographs in a new exhibition. That same year, his innovative play/film hybrid, Helen Lawrence, was performed for the first time in the UK at the Edinburgh International Festival.

You can find out more about Stan Douglas’ Fruitmarket exhibition at the gallery’s online archive, where you can also listen to a lecture on his work by Amsterdam based cultural analyst Mieke Bal.

The book produced to accompany the show, featuring essays by Fiona Bradley and Mieke Bal, is available from Fruitmarket’s online bookshop.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A panel discussion from 2013, between artist Gabriel Orozco, curator Briony Fer and art historian Benjamin Buchloh, chaired by Fruitmarket’s director Fiona Bradley.

Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist who lives and works mainly in Tokyo and Mexico City. His work blurs the boundaries of art with everyday realities and often balances complex geometry with organic materials and elements of chance.

In 2013 Fruitmarket showed Gabriel Orozco's exhibition Thinking in Circles, which was curated by Briony Fer. The exhibition took Orozco’s 2005 painting The Eye of Go as its starting point, and looked at how the circular geometric motif of this painting – part of a way of thinking for Orozco, a way to organise ideas – migrates onto other work, recurring in other paintings, sculptures and photographs.

Through the exhibition and in her accompanying essay, Fer asked how far it is possible to think with the work rather than about it.

You can find out more about the Thinking in Circles show at Fruitmarket’s online archive, and the book produced to accompany the exhibition is still available from our online bookshop.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A mix of speech, music and song from Karine Polwart, introducing the plans for her 2025/26 writing residency with Fruitmarket.

Karine Polwart is a writer, musician, and storyteller whose work evokes a richness of place, hidden histories, scientific enquiry and folklore.

She has been selected as the recipient of the 2025/25 Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship, for which Fruitmarket is the host organisation.

The Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship, supported by Creative Scotland, offers the opportunity for a mid-career writer to spend a year dedicated to producing their own new writing, with the support and inspiration of a host organisation.

Ticket details for Karine’s August 2025 show, Windblown, at Queen’s Hall, are here: https://www.thequeenshall.net/whats-on/karine-polwart-windblown 

Archive televised film of Dick Gaughan performing Now Westlin Winds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ7oYCx6tBw

Karine refers to Robbie Nichol in this podcast. Robbie is now Professor of Place-Based Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. 

Fruitmarket is a free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, which provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences.  We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

Creativity makes space for meaning, and we create a welcoming space for people to think with contemporary art and culture in ways that are helpful to them – for free. Further information at fruitmarket.co.uk. Follow us on Bluesky,  Facebook,  Instagram, TikTok. 

A panel discussion on Louis Bourgeois featuring British sculptor Phyllida Barlow, and art historians Elisabeth Lebovici and Mignon Nixon, chaired by Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley.

Louise Bourgeois is one of the greatest and most influential artists of our time. In a career spanning seven decades, from the 1940s until her death in 2010, she produced some of contemporary art’s most enduring images. Bourgeois’s work is personal yet universal, rooted in the details of her own life, but reaching out to touch the lives of others.

In 2013 Fruitmarket presented I Give Everything Away, an exhibition of Bourgeois’ work on paper, featuring some of her most intimate work, both drawing and writing.

The show included Bourgeois’s Insomnia Drawings, a remarkable suite of 220 drawings and writings made between November 1994 and June 1995. Also in the exhibition were two suites of large-scale works on paper, When Did This Happen? from 2007, and I Give Everything Away, made right at the end of the artist’s life in 2010. A mix of writing, drawing and printmaking, these large works are both haunted and haunting.

A major ARTIST ROOMS exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art coincided with the Fruitmarket show.

To accompany these two exhibitions, Fruitmarket,  the ARTIST ROOMS Research Partnership, and National Galleries of Scotland organised Future Bourgeois – a symposium on new research on Bourgeois, which included the panel discussion between Barlow, Lebovici and Nixon.

More info on I Give Everything Away, including images and video, can be found in Fruitmarket's online archive.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A conversation between British-European artist Tacita Dean and Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley, recorded in 2018 to accompany Dean’s exhibition Woman with a Red Hat.

Best known for her use of film, and her advocacy for its preservation as an artistic medium, Tacita has a wide-ranging practice that includes drawings, photographs, installations and collections of found objects and images.

She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008.

The works in her Fruitmarket exhibition asked us to consider the ways in which theatrical artifice can transport us, and ultimately deliver truth through fiction.

The title – Woman with a Red Hat – was taken from the film Event for a Stage, around which the exhibition pivoted. Originally commissioned for the 2014 Sydney Biennale as a live theatre piece, the work was Dean’s first foray into the theatre and her first experience of working with an actor. The film is an intricate interweaving of the four consecutive performances of the piece. The fierce interplay between the artist and the actor, Stephen Dillane, as they struggle to understand and accommodate each other’s artforms makes for a compelling, complex investigation into the balance of reality and illusion in both.

For more details about the show, visit the Fruitmarket online archive. The book which accompanied the exhibition is available from Fruitmarket’s online bookshop.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

2024 was Fruitmarket’s fiftieth birthday. As part of our celebrations we published Words and Things, a selection of just some of the writing on art published by Fruitmarket over the decades, edited by Ruth Bretherick, the gallery’s Research and Public Engagement Curator.

To launch the book, Ruth and Fruitmarket head of publishing Elizabeth McLean were joined in conversation with Words and Things contributors David Hopkins, Briony Fer and James Robertson. They discussed the past and the future of writing about and alongside art, and the relationship between art and language.

The book published to accompany the show can be bought from our online bookshop, where you can also buy many of the books Fruitmarket has published over our 50 years.

Featuring contributions from, among others, Marina Abramovic, Laura Mulvey, Frances Morris and Ali Smith, the book brings together art historical scholarship by the world's leading thinkers on art and artists' writings and in-conversations, punctuated by poems and short stories.

From painting to performance, sculpture to film, the book captures the way in which contemporary art can help us think through the pressing social and political issues of our times, but also offer space to experience material artworks as 'present tense things', as artists Emma Hart and Dean Kenning put it.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

Extracts of a conversation between artists Mike Nelson and Simon Patterson and art historian, lecturer and writer Patricia Bickers, from the opening of Print the Legend: The Myth of the West, at Fruitmarket in 2008.

British artist Mike Nelson is known for immersive, absorbing installations assembled from the detritus of everyday lives. Often referencing works of literature or countercultural or fringe political movements, his work transforms the spaces it inhabits.

This summer Mike is taking over Fruitmarket with his new show Humpty Dumpty/ a transient history of Mardin earthworks / low rise, which opens on 27th June 2025 and runs until early October.

In 2008 Mike was part of the group exhibition Print the Legend at Fruitmarket, alongside artists including Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Cornelia Parker and Simon Patterson. Curated by Patricia Bickers, Print the Legend was a critical response to the western and the myth of the west, exploring themes such as narrative, conflict, fiction and truth, justice and injustice, frontiers and desire.

Further details about the show, including images and video, can be found at the Fruitmarket online archive.

Mike Nelson’s piece, Untitled No.22 (High Plains Drifter) (1993/2001/2008), involved spray painting one of our fire escapes and the entire contents of a store cupboard with several coats of red paint to create a disorientating, breath-taking new environment.

This was a reference to the film High Plains Drifter, but also painting, and in particular the work of the artist Niele Toroni, whose signature style is the measured repetition of a single brushstroke. In High Plains Drifter, Clint Eastwood’s character takes revenge on the citizens of Lago, getting them to paint their own town red, transforming it into a living hell.

Simon Patterson’s wall drawing, Western: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1997), references the concept of the frame and horizon, portraying a metaphorical moral landscape through the representation of the Kodak™ Gray Scale, an exposure-testing format used in photography. The names of the three main actors in the film, Lee Marvin (who plays the outlaw Liberty Valance), John Wayne (the gunfighter) and James Stewart (the lawyer), are painted in black, grey and white, respectively, to denote their relative ethics, and good and bad actions –the equivalent of the black hat and the white hat in early westerns.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A conversation recorded in 2023 between composer Sara Glojnarić and journalist and author Kate Molleson, recorded in front of a live audience at Fruitmarket’s first Deep Time festival of new music ahead of the world premiere of Sara’s piece seconds, minutes, hours, eons, - commisioned by Fruitmarket and the ensemble p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r.

Germany-based Croatian composer Sara Glojnarić is the winner of the Ernst von Siemens Förderpreis 2023, Erste Bank Composition Award and Darmstadt’s Kranichstein Music Prize. Kate Molleson presents BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show and the author of the award-winning book Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the Twentieth Century. 

For more details about previous iterations of Deep Time, visit the Fruitmarket online archive.

The 2025 edition of Fruitmarket’s annual Deep Time festival, titled I See Red, will be curated by Raven Chacon in the Fruitmarket Warehouse from 27.11.25–29.11.25. Full programme will be released in September 2025.

Ahead of this, in August 2025, Fruitmarket and EAF25 present the UK premiere of Voiceless Mass, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composition by Diné composer, performer, and artist Raven Chacon, performed by Scottish Ensemble at Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, the Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk, where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

Artists William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland in conversation with curator Tamar Garb.

The conversation was recorded at the opening of the 2016 Fruitmarket exhibition William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in letters and lines. Curated by Garb, this exhibition brought together the work of the two prominent South African artists, mapping their artistic friendship through shared artistic strategies and a common sense of the urgency and agency of art.

Further details about the show, including images and video, can be found at the Fruitmarket online archive. 

The book published to accompany the show features an insightful essay by Garb, a conversation between Kentridge and Koorland, and writing from Briony Fer, Joseph Leo Koerner, Ed Krcma and Griselda Pollock. Lavishly illustrated, it offers the chance to look in a new way at the work of these two significant artists. Buy it now from our online bookshop. 

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, the Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

Curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley discuss the art of Senga Nengudi.

This conversation was recorded in 2019, when Fruitmarket showed the first solo institutional exhibition of Nengudi’s work outside the United States.

Born in Chicago in 1943, Senga Nengudi has been a trailblazer in sculpture for fifty years. A vital figure in the avant-garde scenes of Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, her work is characterised by a persistently radical experimentation with material and form.

Linda Goode Bryant founded the New York artists’ space Just Above Midtown, which showed work by African-American artists, including Nengudi, in the 1970s and 80s. 

Further details about the 2019 Senga Nengudi show, including images and video, can be found at the Fruitmarket online archive.

Originally organised by the Henry Moore Institute, the exhibition brought together pioneering sculpture, photography and documentation of performance from 1969 to the present, including recreations of work not seen since the 1970s and a major new installation.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, the Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.