Susan Hiller, Lucidity and Intuition: Homage to Gertrude Stein, 2011

What could be more uncanny than neat piles of books actually underneath a desk, if not neat piles of books on a decidedly uncanny subject? In this case, automatic writing. For Gertrude Stein, to whom this sculpture is intended as a homage, the books represent a return of the repressed.…

Rory Macbeth, The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, 2011

Looking at art and reading can seem poles apart. Galleries are public spaces in which we move from one room to another. Reading is usually sedentary and usually in some way private. But The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, by Rory Macbeth, suggests otherwise. The title promises a mobile activity, while…

Ben Washington, I Will Eat This Sleepy Town (installation detail), 2011

For all the world you expect this image to move. It is a back lit screen with a casing as substantial as a cathode ray tube. We have come to expect computerised tablets to sing and dance, why not this? But no matter how long you watch, the piece is…