In Between Times
Until November 20; Tramway, Glasgow

The Lyon Biennale is making a bid for world domination. The French festival of contemporary art has spread its tentacles across Europe, inviting six key cities to mount exhibitions in tandem with the Biennale. Glasgow’s Tramway has jumped at the opportunity to commission new work from five young Scottish and French artists.

The exhibition literature tries hard to posit a theme for the show – “which tells of the states of things, whilst alluding to that which lies beyond what we see.” That pretty much covers everything, so best not to worry if you can’t spot a common thread.

The Tramway’s hangar-like gallery is more suited to 70 artworks than seven, but the new pieces manage to pad out the space reasonably well. Kader Attia has strung tall black curtains from the great heights of the Tramway ceiling to make a cocoon-like space for his dark installation.

Inside, two old-fashioned alarm clocks of different styles are crammed back to back in a bell jar. Their out-of-phase ticking comes at you from four corner speakers, increasing the sense that two entities have been jammed uncomfortably close to each other. The exhibition literature suggests that these two entities are Algeria and France, though the work itself gives no explicit clues.

A few feet from Attia’s lofty room-within-a-room sits a white cube, like a sculpture in its own right. Inside plays a film by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, the result of their first ever collaboration. In retrospect, the combination seems obvious. The two artists share a stealthy approach to art-making, playing an ostensibly objective role while exercising the power of their gaze.

The pair filmed the British Consul General in Hong Kong, editing the silent footage together in two halves, the lower half often mirroring, upside down, the upper frame. Lingering close-ups of oriental interiors and ornaments are cut together with the grand marbled sweep of the Consul’s hall, and shots of him in his gown supping tea. The divides between public and private, and eastern and western are subtly probed. Nashashibi’s knack for quiet observation is enhanced by Skaer’s bent for restructuring images.

Rob Kennedy’s video installation is cleverly put together: on a wooden billboard is projected a patchwork of cut and paste images and texts about the pitfalls of language and translation, all stuttering with video interference. Or so it seems. In fact the cut and paste images are physically present on the billboard, and the video projection adds nothing but interference.

Every so often three nearby monitors flash into action, relaying an 18 minute story of composition and decomposition. Clever references to language, form and alienation abound. There is really too much packed into this installation, which has enough material in it for three separate works.

Young Frenchman Fabien Verschaere takes up the centre space of the gallery with a colourful display of wooden words, spelling out the legend “Music is Liquid” to anyone who’s interested. The words, on Hollywood-style frames, sit on a bright red carpet cut into the shape of a typical cartoon splat.

Verschaere continues the cartoon theme in a black and white frieze the length of three walls. An impenetrable story is played out with frequent use of skulls, penises, and bodily gushing of various sorts, all redolent of high-school graffiti.

A third work, on video, puts a similar cartoon to music, its animated characters scrolling along the stained plywood walls of a claustrophobically enclosed space. Although Verschaere is making a name for himself across Europe with his idiosyncratic drawings, I’m much more tickled by his dingy plywood cinema and his splat-shaped carpet.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 30.10.05