Hannah Forbes Black

Since communism's 'death' on the world stage - a fake death for insurance purposes, as an approximation no less vague than the Soviet model is currently going from strength to strength in China - it has become little more than a form of kitsch. At least, that's the view from western Europe, where, like victors often do, we take the accidents of history as destiny.

Things aren't so clear-cut for those who grew up in socialist countries and saw regimes dissolve during their teens, or at least that's the party line in All That Remains. the Teenagers of Socialism, a thoughtfully assembled exhibition of artists who come from countries in the former Soviet bloc.

Perhaps the most hands-on engagement with history came with East German Florian Wust's wall-based installation, Oberwasser. It consists of a line drawing of an office in perfect bureaucratic muddle, done in marker pen straight onto the wall, overlaid with invented newspaper clippings with tracing-paper English translations pinned over them. The whole thing comes with a densely printed leaflet explaining the piece's references in great detail, which I found somehow off-putting, although maybe that was the point.

Conversely, I only found out after leaving the gallery that Anna Baumgart's Hypothesis of the Stolen Image was based on a photograph of East Berliners escaping the GDR just before the wall went up, but the work had already communicated something of the kind. It's a half-creepy half-earnest restaging of the figures in a photograph as little resin statues, all but one painted in the greys of the original black and white Reuters image. Photographs promise preservation but keep the past at bay - Baumgart is critiquing reportage's pretence at reality, but a residual empathy renders her curious little ciphers sympathetic rather than ridiculous, as if she'd tried to redeem the photograph by coaxing its subjects back into physical being.

Baumgart's little figures were reminiscent of a natural history display or one of those walk-through museums where furniture from different eras is displayed in a series of evolving living rooms. So too was Stefan Constantinescu's The Golden Age for Children, a pop-up book set up on a shabby school desk. The book tells the story of his childhood and the history of Romania under Ceaucescu with helpful pop-ups and moving tabs - the illusion of participation without any of the potential for disruption. The book borrows the already-dubious politically instructive language of socialism and coats it in a further varnish of nostalgia and irony.

I found Lukasz Ronduda's Cameo incredibly involving on a conceptual level - Ronduda, a curator by trade, has edited together clips featuring cameos by avant-garde Polish filmmakers in mainstream films. The films promote the narrative devices the filmmakers' own work is trying to deconstruct. The more I think about this piece, the more I like it. However, the actual installation was difficult to get to grips with - the little cluster of TVs in the centre of the space were more of a distraction than an enhancement, and I'm eager to see Ronduda's single-screen version of the same work.

It was tempting but probably silly to try to draw parallels between artists and their country of origin, but apart from Wust's interest in bureaucracy the only other link I could think of was Teresa Buskova, who was born in gentle, Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia and at first glance felt like the odd one out. Her video Spring Equinox follows some weird half-naked sylphs as they prance around the countryside doing strange things with cardboard cut-outs - remixed folklore with a beguiling humour and menace.

As the sound slurred into the other video installations, I wondered if there was the ghost of a suggestion that politics isn't as far away from myth as we'd like to think. Retold from a distance far greater than 20 years, these still-painful stories of lost civilisations may yet become as weird and abstract as a folk dance.