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A trio of new and unsettling perspectives

Visit Doggerfisher in the next month and you’ll find yourself walking from the street straight into a darkened space in which is shown a film by young American artist Anita Di Bianco. Even without this rather confrontational opener, Di Bianco’s film Disaffection and Disaffectation would by its very length (50 minutes) dominate this group show, curated by Lucy Skaer.

Jane Austen-ish title aside, the film is inspired by Jean Genet’s play Les Bonnes (‘The Maids’), which was, in turn, inspired by the true story of two maids who murdered their mistress in 1933.

Di Bianco’s reworked script, acted by Skaer and fellow artist Hanneline Visnes and shot in a single day, captures the claustrophobic nature of both stories.

By reducing the cast members from three to two, and interchanging the roles of mistress and maid between the ‘actors’, Di Bianco heightens the sense of a constantly shifting power-balance.

While it doesn’t do anything radically different from the Genet original, it succeeds in creating a piece of work which is even more unsettling to watch.

Di Bianco’s other offering here is a work-in-progress about Joan of Arc, showing the artist reading aloud from a textual collage which draws on sources as diverse as Carl Dreyer’s 1928 movie, Bob Dylan, 20th century poet ee cummings and the trial of Louis XVI. It’s gorgeously shot, but hasn’t yet found the direction one hopes for the finished film.

Glasgow-trained artist Sophie Macpherson contributes a collection of objects which evoke aspects of performance. Some suggest presence – a lovely pencil drawing of a figure fastening a ruff, a wooden relief sculpture of a shoe. But most speak of absence: a stage without a puppet, a conjuror’s box without the tricks.

A more malevolent presence is also evoked by a series of cut-outs, black-on-black depictions of shadow puppet shapes. Thus a parlour game becomes something more sinister: even when the light is removed, these shadowy creatures show no signs of disappearing.

Rosalind Nashashibi – who along with Skaer has been selected to represent Scotland in this year’s Venice Biennale – has a walk-on part here in the form of two photographs from a book on medieval architecture, enlarged and turned upside down.

No doubt they are meant to set you thinking about inverted gothic arches and resulting associations of light, space and transcendence. But what they actually do is both simpler and more unsettling.

Once you overcome the overwhelming desire to take the thing off the wall and hang it the right way up, it starts to play with your sense of perception: is it upside down, or am I? Although I’d like to see more of Nashashibi’s work in this show, a room full of these would be a highly disconcerting experience.