Sophie Calle is a tremendous artist but an unscrupulous chambermaid. In the early 1980s she took a temporary job cleaning rooms in a Venetian hotel - and took her camera with her. For three weeks she snooped through the belongings of the unsuspecting guests, the contents of whose luggage is displayed in a series of documentary wall panels, glossed with matter-of-fact transcripts, such as: "Banana peels, bottle of water and a pair of hardly worn black, flat heels (they fit me. I take them)." You can only hope that no one left her a tip.
Calle's Hotel Room series is included here as an example of the voyeuristic strain in contemporary art. Telling Tales is an exhibition that makes you feel slightly furtive. Every item compounds your curiosity and deepens your guilt.
The subtitle of the exhibition is Narrative Impulses in Recent Art, which really means Narrative Impulses in Recent Curatorship. The thesis posits that after abstraction, art had nowhere left to go but to a form of figuration that you have to figure out for yourself. Hence the preponderance here of figurative pieces with no figures in them. Paul Winstanley's institutional rooms and Thomas Demand's mock-ups of imaginary architecture encapsulate a certain enigma, but you could argue that both artists are engaged in the opposite of telling stories, diverting us towards dead-end spaces where nothing happens at all.
The theme works better when applied to the new breed of drama queens. Tracey Emin, though, is almost too obvious an example. The curators dutifully pin up her hand-scrawled CV ("1983 - apply to art school with no qualifications"), and run a video about the time when all the people she ever slept with came back to haunt her. But there's not much of Emin's life story left to expose.
Far more intriguing are Nan Goldin's salacious mementos of walks on the wild side, in which the dramatis personae of a Lou Reed number spill out of the nightspots, cabs and lavatories of New York. Whether this qualifies Goldin as a storyteller, however, depends on her ever remembering precisely what happened the evening before.
· Until August 11. Details: 0151-702 7400.
