Celia White

This exhibition's title is as intriguing as it is arbitrary. Taken from the novel All the King's Horses by Michele Bernstein, the phrase epitomises the scepticism towards received narratives characteristic of the 1960s Situationist movement of which Bernstein was a member. Contempt for the prescriptive nature of both language and the structure of the city led the Situationists to practice 'detournement' - navigating the city in unexpected ways to establish a personal, alternative narrative. In this vein, this exhibition presents seven artists who take a critical approach to conventional practices of recording and reiterating.

Excerpts from Bernstein's book appear in large letters on the gallery walls. Despite this, the show seems to encourage the viewer to wander from this staunchly conceptualised underpinning: to partake in a Situationist 'drift', following the individual thematic whims of the artist rather than any prescribed curatorial pattern.

If these artists are carving their own paths, their winding detours are by definition unique and subjective. At one extreme sits the pure beauty and technical mastery of Stuart Bailes' photographs. At the other, the ostensibly political nature of Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann's Museum, a video about the proposed cultural regeneration of 1950s Baghdad by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, soon gives way to a nuanced reflection on medium. The video's historical narrative is taken from Wikipedia, its images from Google. Alongside its overt commentary on cultural transplantation via architecture, this video highlights the imperialistic powers of visual and verbal language: specifically, the emerging authority given to Wikipedia's blanket narrativisation of the world's past and present history.

The best work in the show is that which is also exceedingly frustrating - a necessary paradox, since easily consumed messages are thin on the ground in an exhibition about the limitations of narrative. Jorge de la Garza's photographic collages are formed of bluntly truncated scenes and obscured body parts: eerie minimalist tales with cliff-hanger endings. The undeveloped stories behind Noemie Goudal's stunning large-scale photographs send us on fruitless deciphering missions.

In Adam Thomas' Free Fall series, paperbacks on politics, history and psychology have sections of their covers cut out to reveal the books' contents. In doing so, these texts gently ironise the book covers' attempts at an all-encompassing visual representation of what the book contains; on a deeper level, they reveal the complexities of defining abstract concepts in words. Thomas's work draws upon a conclusion central to this show: that penetrating to the heart of the matter, whether in a direct or roundabout way, rarely answers more questions than it offers.