Video art in Glasgow's GOMA? Surely some mistake. This infamously populist gallery, initially filled by Julian Spalding, has rightly been maligned for including the work of Beryl Cook but not work by the city's hottest young stars working in new media and installation, such as Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland.
But now there is a new team of curators in this post-Spalding era, trying to turn the gallery's fortunes around with cringe and blush-free contemporary shows. Infinitude is the most startling of these, by virtue of foregrounding everything GOMA has to date left out: video, digital works, interactive photography, computer-generated loveliness. There is strong work here, important beyond novelty.
Beverley Hood's Asex is a suggestive screensaver, based on digital representations of the body; Steve Hollings-worth's chairs (one made out of neon as a ghostly trace of a seat) sit well here; Daniel Reeves's three channel video installation, Try to Live to See This, encompasses all of life and more.
Dalziel + Scullion, best known for their site-specific public works, are showing a new video projection, Another Place, for the first time. It's as seductive in its own way as Hood's curvy, supple screensaver: portraits of people against an craggy coastline in ever-so-slightly slow motion. Every blink becomes a languorous moment, every flutter of wind through their hair seems a choreographed, beautiful movement; it is hypnotic yet avowedly simple.
There are limitations, mostly to do with the gallery space. It's the basement gallery, presumably for reasons of lighting: already a dark, black and red tinged space. It's an awkward area, with permanent exhibits simply covered up, and people, not unreasonably, were having trouble navigating them, expecting them to be part of the show. If GOMA wants to be taken seriously as a contemporary art venue, it will need to look more professional.
Stephen Hurrel's LED display unit, Threshold, greets you as you step into the gallery. "What did you dream last night?" it asked me. Answer: that this kind of work, in a gallery that has soaked up Glasgow's art budget for a decade, wouldn't be such a novelty.
Until October 22. Details: 0141-229 1996.
