At The Same Time Somewhere Else
Until February 19; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Since Simon Starling won the Turner Prize a few weeks ago, everybody’s heard of research-based art.

It’s a slippery term, just like conceptual art. Even the Impressionists could be described as conceptual, if you consider their interest in capturing the instant, optical impression as revealed to them by new photographic technologies. As for research-based art, you could easily include Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical studies, or Paul Klee’s systematic investigations of colour.

The fact that all of the above resulted in pretty pictures is what sets them apart from today’s conceptual and research-based art. Starling did have a pretty watercolour of a cactus in his Turner Prize show, but it’s the Shedboatshed that people remember. The fickle wooden structure was not a presentation of data, the result of some scientifically controlled research. It was the remnant of an experiment whose meaning lies not in the results, but in the absurdist thesis on which it was based.

The new work on show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, although not billed as research-based art, occupies similar territory. Three young continental artists are brought together in a stylish show which combines elements of documentary, journalism and research, challenging topical issues on a new front.

The balance of media is refreshing, allowing you to move from film to photography, and from text to interactive installation. You’re given a chance to study each work in its own generous space, the uncrowded gallery looking whiter than ever. While the works are comparable in many ways, there’s enough variety to keep things interesting.

French artist Melik Ohanian is represented by a strangely disconnected series of works. Two are frustratingly devoid of context. The third, Invisible Film, offers a certain lingering poetry, echoing the Quixotic allure of Simon Starling’s journeys. Ohanian has projected a 1970s film, Punishment Park, onto the same Californian desert in which it was originally made, filming the result.

The result, however, is nothing but a whirring projector in an empty landscape. Although we can hear the soundtrack, we don’t see the fictional peace activists struggling in a fictional US detention camp, where their rights are ignored in the name of homeland security. In all this nothingness, the terrible invisibility of Guantánamo Bay becomes tangibly present.

Sean Snyder’s three projects about the Iraq war are the ongoing results of fairly straightforward research. The artist scours the internet for online photo albums belonging to soldiers and contractors in war-torn Iraq, mounting them in a glossy display. A cat sits behind barbed wire. Bundles of cash are heaped against a wall. There are street signs, curious kids, chandeliers and golden elevators. Several cityscapes are viewed down the barrel of a mounted gun.

These are the personal mementos of soldiers whose mindset lurks somewhere between tourism and ownership. But while the results of this and Snyders’s other investigations are worthy of an interesting magazine feature, they do little more than nip at the heels of a deadly important theme.

The strongest work in the show is that of Danish artist Pia Rönicke. Her nine-part storyboard, Urban Fiction, draws attention to the scripting impulse of urban theorists such as Le Corbusier, who wanted literally to shape the lives of individuals and communities.

Her handsome documentary, Zonen, places three amiable young architects in lush fields and meadows, as they discuss the intricacies of urban planning. Whether it’s the youthful exuberance of the architects, the occasional comedy sound effect, or the strange disjunction between subject and setting, you’re left wondering if this can be genuine. If there’s one theme which runs through the whole show, it’s this niggling awareness that truth is stranger than fiction.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.01.06