In ‘Low Rise’, upstairs in Fruitmarket, London sculptor and installation artist Mike Nelson re-assembles fragments of Heygate, a demolished south London housing estate. Girders, rafters and beams sit beside dusty 90s video-game machines and a faded wooden St George’s Cross. The accompanying notes stay vague, mentioning a project that Nelson began but ‘ceased whilst under construction in 2014’; the public art project was pulled after opposition from locals, although Nelson may have been critiquing the social cleansing, as hinted at in his exhibition notes, where he ambiguously mentions ‘political undercurrents’.

Downstairs, ‘A Transient History Of Mardin Earthworks’ is his series of photos of a mainly Kurdish region of south-east Turkey. Nelson, who has been nominated twice for the Turner Prize, visited Mardin in 2012 when the town was undergoing massive redevelopment. Poignant piles of rubble and diggers on construction sites show the upheaval as the town modernised with new pipes and internet. No phoenixes rise from any ashes in Nelson’s melancholic works; either in London or Mardin.

The show’s title, Humpty Dumpty, references the nursery rhyme where things couldn’t be put back together again. Highlighting the eerie lack of people, there’s a silhouetted donkey, a statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (former Turkish president), and some disembodied shop mannequins. Nelson’s takeover of Fruitmarket’s warehouse is the most moving section, where he has recreated the derelict interior of flats, complete with ghostly anaglypta wallpaper, fractured frosted glass and 1980s light fittings. Nostalgia, neglect and loss make for a strangely potent mix in this atmospheric collection. 

Mike Nelson: Humpty Dumpty, Fruitmarket, until 5 October; main picture: Neil Hanna.