Mike Nelson - The Pumpkin Palace

During the Edinburgh Festival, Collective Gallery presented the commissioned re-presentation of Mike Nelson's The Pumpkin Palace, a work created using a 1954 GMC transit bus.

The Pumpkin Palace 2003 has been transported from the CCAC Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, where it was originally commissioned, to be developed and re-presented by the artist for the Edinburgh Festival.

British artist Mike Nelson is known for his meticulously detailed installations, many of which simulate run-down habitats of the stateless or subversive, their absence articulated by architectural space and symbolically charged props.

The Pumpkin Palace appears – from the outside at least - as a Red Crescent hospital bus, a relic from a Muslim-majority nation such as Afghanistan or Pakistan

On entering the bus, visitors find themselves in an environment that splits the difference between an opium den and a mobile field hospital, cut with the West Coast bus culture of the 60's epitomized by the Merry Pranksters. Drug culture and production mix with foreign policy to create a constantly repeating cycle of the abused feeding the abused.

Nelson's bus provocatively reminds us of the casualties of war, both abroad and at home whilst drawing attention to the historical complexity that underpins the defining of such categorisation.

 All photos courtesy of Collective Gallery