Hannah Forbes Black

The eponymous centrepiece of Johanna Billing's lovely Camden Arts Centre Show, I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm , is a video of a group of young amateur dancers in Romania performing to a rendition of a song by Wildbirds & Peacedrums. Paying tender attention to small details, Billing focuses the mind on the social body - the body among others, the body aware of itself. The choreography is simple and repetitive, the dancing unpolished, the space itself improvised, temporary-looking. Footage of shabby buildings and passersby in the street reminds us that the larger context here is a post-totalitarian country struggling to find new ways of relating the individual and society - the song is meant for lovers, but, in this new context, it's also an ambiguous plaint for the lost rhythms of a disappeared social order. It's all more optimistic than I've made it sound, though - Billing treats her subjects with an unreserved warmth and tenderness; she's interested in performance as an experience, not as a crafted perfection.

With a nod to choreographers like Yvonne Rainer's explorations of everyday movement, Billing investigates the sense of having a body and how we perform our being. Another work, Where She Is At, loops footage of a swimmer poised on a diving board, apparently trying to decide whether to dive or not. The camera cranes up at the swimmer from a human scale as she expresses her hesitancy, turning back and forth, torn between her sense of exposure and its attendant desire to perform, not to disappoint, and her fear of the long fall into the pool. It's an elegant, even beautiful expression of how the personality faces both inwards and outwards.

Scattered on the table just next to Where She Is At are DVDs of one of Billing's long-running projects, You Don't Love Me Yet. In locations around Europe and the US, she has commissioned local musicians to perform renditions of the same song. Ranging from the painfully earnest to the actually pretty good, these covers find room for inflexion and, yes, inclusivity in a not especially memorable tune. Defiantly banal, the song acquires pathos through the repetitions that Billing has collected. Seeing the same thing performed over and over gives you space to focus on the making and the moment rather than the end result - in fact there is no end result really, as the point is just this accumulation of renditions. You're invited to look beyond the performance, to take a position other than passive admiration. Like everything Billing does, it's humanising and generous.

These explorations of inclusion and participation can perhaps be usefully contrasted with something like Antony Gormley's fourth plinth project. While Gormley's One and Other exemplifies the kind of patronising public art that believes the best way for the public to participate in art is to literally be in it, Billing is concerned with subtler and, in the end, more moving ways in which art can celebrate the performance of ordinary life. Billing knows that the mechanisms of empathy aren't as literal as some would have them.