I'm at the gallery for the last hour of opening. Maybe everyone else heard the announcement of its imminent closure, or kept an eye on the time, but suddenly I'm alone. The gallery stewards have gone too, though traces of their presence (clipboards, exhibition catalogues) linger. I look up from Maria Lindberg's drawings, slight things - though troubling - in black and gashes of blood red, and see the gallery's doors closing.
I'm shut in, alone, rooted to the spot. It takes minutes, rather than seconds, to try the door that - I actually gasp - isn't locked and does open. Later, recounting the tale, I keep reaching for a word to explain the state I was in. Traumatised, I say, and my friends know exactly what I mean.
It's a term we use all too often, one which, like stress, seems to have grown into a symptomatic description of now. Largely freed from its original meaning of a physical wound (except in TV shows such as ER), the word "trauma" has become shorthand for a very modern state of mind. We know there is something big and scary called post-traumatic stress disorder, and we know the scale of events that trigger it. Otherwise, we pepper our chat with casual references to trauma, use it to describe dark moments in our personal lives and overwhelming times in our collective consciousness - the death of Diana, Hillsborough, a "senseless" killing. It is why we go to therapy; it is what we know we are looking at when we see cruel images of suffering from war, famine and torture. Can any one word survive such an overload of meaning?
A new touring exhibition (co-organised by the Hayward Gallery and Dundee Contemporary Arts) investigates, showing work by 12 artists that in some way inscribes individual or collective trauma, or its psychological and political consequences. It is a big show in its scope and effect, an exhibition without explicit shocks (except for some scenes in Johan Grimonprez's savagely intelligent video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, and even these are counterpoised by a disco soundtrack) and yet with an insidious, downright creepy power about it. We don't see what causes the trauma the work relates to, but instead we see its aftermath, a trail of silent shock, a mood of wounding. It gets to you after a while.
Domestic space is picked out as a site for trauma, just as we might expect, but it is done here in startlingly different ways. Willie Docherty's photographs of hurriedly abandoned living rooms in Northern Ireland, all smudgy footprints on lino and upturned tatty furniture, evoke the violent anguish that has cleared the place. In Scarred for Life II, Tracey Moffatt spoofs the conventions of photo-journalism in magazines such as Life. Laced with bitter, burning irony, Moffatt uses this format to look at domestic rituals and the dysfunctional horror that home can be, with captions such as: "For his own safety while he played, his mother tied him up with pantyhose. The nextdoor neighbours called the police."
Martin Boyce's boarded-up Eames shelving unit, Now I've Got Worry, also reeks of dysfunction, with panels painted with paranoid, defensive slogans nailed over it: "Private Property - Keep Out" and "Go Home - there is nothing 2 see." Displaying these signs on the inside of a house, on furniture (and then facing inwards on the shelving), speaks of a radical dislocation, a break down of the boundary between interior and exterior into a claustrophobic confusion. Quietly, simply, eloquently, it smashes any notions of domestic bliss. Much of the work included in Trauma has this eerily still and yet terrifying quality to it, a reminder that trauma at its most unnerving operates simultaneously as a psychic shock and a physical reaction. Some works here - Kendell Geers's tangle of emergency lights, Guillermo Kuitca's elegiac and emotive oil paintings, even Grimonprez's aeroplane hijack footage - intrigue but don't feel as if they might tear you apart with their threat, their strange menace.
Lucia Nogueira's work - a wall-mounted arrangement of wood and nails like a primitive object of torture, and an empty bell jar, chipped and stained with a drop of what looks like blood - does, though its malevolence is only whispered, hinted at. Christopher Wool's stack of text-based paint ings (made with Felix Gonzalez-Torres) reveals a moment when trauma presents itself ("The show is over. The audience gets up to leave. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around. No more coats and no more home") but does so, terrifyingly, without context or resolution. Even more troubling, Ann-Sofi Sidén's film, QM, I Think I Call Her QM, is quite the darkest, weirdest thing in the exhibtion and shows a lonely psychiatrist's descent into madness, largely cut off from the world in her flat with only a primordial creature, the "Queen of Mud", who she finds under her bed, for company. Watching it alone in the dark left me jittery, jumpy, exhausted; unable to run towards that closing door. Trauma had settled on me. It would take some time to leave.
• Trauma is at Dundee Contemporary Arts (01382 606220), until September 2, then tours to Colchester and Oxford.
