'The activity of finance is not… particularly visual,' says a voice in Zachary Formwalt's video 'In Place of Capital', over blank views of corporate architecture. This group show – half of a two-part project, the rest being at Berlin's MD 72 – frequently demonstrates that assertion's truth. Andreas Siekmann's 21 A1 prints present confidently precise but abstruse diagrams-cum-timelines that list enacted laws, numbers of unemployed, collapsing financial markets and new commercial ones, styles of labour (eg McJobs) and integrated systems of consultancies, law firms, think tanks. They're less explanatory than foxing, perhaps deliberately; Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri's C-prints, depicting patchwork flowcharts of capitalism in tiny script, similarly evoke a complexity that's exhausting to try and absorb.
This defeatist air of exclusionary density even infects relatively accessible works: Franck Scurti's digital video 'La Linea (Tractatus Logico-Economicus)', an antic animated line figure cavorting across scrolling stock-exchange indexes – sometimes exploding, sometimes toting sacks of money – might just picture markets as perpetually unstable and surprising, but one still ends up feeling to be missing something. Meanwhile, the text of an anonymously authored painting suggests that art can't change anything, only illuminate enabling conditions. Maybe art's role vis-à-vis contemporary economics does exceed a reflection of intractable intricacy, but it'll take a crash-course MBA and a trip to Berlin before 'Homo Economicus' convinces me.