READING THE TURNER PRIZE THROUGH FISHER

By Lisa Knoll

25/09/2026

Mark Fisher’s hauntology and the industrial ruins at the centre of this year’s Turner Prize

Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life (2014) coined “hauntology” as shorthand for a specific cultural condition: the sense, pervasive in post-industrial Britain, of being haunted not by the past exactly, but by futures that were once confidently anticipated and then quietly abandoned — the promised post-war modernisation of Britain’s industrial north chief among them [1]. Fisher located this haunting less in explicit nostalgia than in a persistent formal unease: culture that keeps circling back to the material and emotional debris of an interrupted future, unable either to fully mourn it or move past it [2].

This year’s Turner Prize shortlist, exhibited at Teesside University’s MIMA in Middlesbrough from 26 September, includes a work that reads almost as a direct illustration of Fisher’s argument. Simeon Barclay’s The Ruin, an hour-long spoken-word performance with live percussion and horn, draws explicitly on Barclay’s upbringing in Huddersfield and, in the jury’s own description, his “lived experience of the industrial landscape of northern England.” The title alone does much of Fisher’s work for him: a ruin is not simply a building; it is physical evidence that a future once under construction stopped being built.

What makes Barclay’s inclusion on this shortlist particularly apt for a hauntological reading is the prize’s own choice of venue. Middlesbrough is not an incidental backdrop; it is a city whose relationship to industrial decline and the region’s unfulfilled promises of post-industrial renewal is, in Fisher’s own analytical terms, close to paradigmatic. Staging a work explicitly about the ruins of northern industrial Britain in a city with Middlesbrough’s specific economic history is not simply appropriate — it collapses the usual critical distance between an artwork’s subject and its exhibition context almost entirely.

Fisher’s framework also helps explain why The Ruin’s formal choices — spoken word rather than a fixed visual object, live percussion and horn rather than recorded sound, a performance that exists fully only in the moment of its delivery — resist the kind of clean historical closure a more conventional memorial artwork might offer. Hauntology, for Fisher, was never really about literal ghosts; it was about cultural forms that refuse the comfort of a finished, past-tense relationship to what has been lost, insisting instead on the lost future’s continued, unresolved presence. A performance piece, repeatable but never identically reproducible, arguably embodies that unresolved quality more precisely than a fixed sculptural monument to industrial loss ever could.

Fisher died in 2017, before Barclay was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and well before this particular staging in Middlesbrough could have entered his analysis directly. But Ghosts of My Life’s central claim — that Britain’s cultural present remains structured by the unfinished business of futures it once believed in and then abandoned — reads less like a historical argument requiring updating and more like a diagnosis this year’s Turner Prize exhibition happens to confirm, almost work for work, at a regional venue Fisher’s own writing would have recognised immediately.

[1] Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.

[2] Fisher, M. (2014), pp. 21–28.