Grönlund\Nisunen
Until February 27; Dundee Contemporary Arts

It’s not unusual these days to walk into a familiar gallery space and find yourself disoriented. The rooms might seem to have moved a little since you were last there. There might be a wall where once there was open space. Doors come and go, and even ceiling heights can shift, although you can rarely say for sure what’s changed.

DCA is a frequent offender: its huge sunlit spaces offer great flexibility for curators and artists, who can make the building fit around the art if they want to.

At the moment, it’s the art that’s been made to fit the building, but in a way that makes you examine every inch of space around you. Finnish duo Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen are trained architects, and you can see it in their art. Instead of using bricks and mortar, the artists build new spaces with intangible materials. At DCA, those materials are sound, light, air and radiation.

Your first encounter will be with Music Box, a sound installation in a darkened room. It’s so black that you can’t see a thing. You inch forward, hands in front of you, hearing the tiny tinkles and squeaks of a music box. The music seems to circle the room, and occasionally it feels so close that it could be right inside your head.

As you inch forward, the walls seem never to arrive. The room feels infinitely big, and the tinkling keeps circling around you. Eventually after a lot of groping you will find the foam-covered walls and the music box in the centre of the room, the Internationale playing on a slowly spinning disc in its centre. A microphone at each of its four corners is connected to a speaker in each corner of the room, projecting the space inside the small music box to fill the whole room, and placing you, virtually speaking, where the little plastic ballerina should be.

When you’ve found the walls and worked out what’s happening, you’re back in control, and the magic fades. Until that point you are lost, disconnected from your usual means of positioning yourself in the world. Even the Internationale, that anchor of socialism, is unrecognisably distorted. The space is sculpted entirely out of darkness and sound.

In another work, three strips of flashing red lights intersect each other, cutting through a small room in three directions. It’s impossible, at this time of year, not to think of Christmas decorations. In the main gallery space sits a brand new work, commissioned by DCA especially for this show. Pneumatic Landscape is a huge, white, air-filled sheet, roughly the shape of a snow-covered Tellytubby Land, and equally Christmassy in feel.

The gentle landscape constantly undulates, almost like breathing organism. When Nahum Tevet’s installation was here in the autumn, you walked around it hoping for a way in. You instinctively desire the same thing now, but as with Tevet’s, there is no way in. It’s not an environment, but a piece of wobbly sculpture to admire from the outside.

A low, bassy growling adds to the impression that the nylon landscape is breathing, but in fact it’s coming from a back room. There, a geiger counter measures the radiation levels in the building and feeds the results into four big subwoofers. And so, the invisible presence of radiation is made distinct through another invisible presence, that of sound.

Grönlund and Nisunen enjoy randomness, allowing their work to be shaped by unseen forces like radiation and airflows. But there needs to be more. With the exception of Music Box, this show is something like a science demonstration, which might be more at home in the science centre next door.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.01.05