Dara Birnbaum's first UK solo show for 30 years is an exhibition of two halves. In the South London Gallery's main space is Arabesque (2011), a video installation which feels modish, with vast screens in an elegant architectural space, and material from YouTube.
On the first floor, meanwhile, are several mid-Seventies videos, themselves archetypically of their time: edgy, handheld, full of social politics and a spare, consciously amateurish technique.
It's an odd conjunction - we have none of the works in between, in which Birnbaum pioneered a kind of politicised remixing of television imagery. Like much of her work, Arabesque deals with gender power struggles, in this case the greater fame of Robert Schumann, despite the arguably equal abilities of Clara, his wife.
Subtitled stills from a 1947 Schumann biopic are shown with YouTube posts of sundry pianists playing Robert's Arabesque Opus 18 (1839), while a video of a woman playing Clara's Romanze 1, Opus 11 of the same year is accompanied by yearning excerpts from Clara's diary.
Birnbaum conjures more than gender issues here, looking at the idea of genius, at the effect of ubiquity on art, and the contemporary media's banal reflection of both the sublime and the mundane. It is an intriguing work in a good show but we need a bigger Birnbaum exhibition to be able to properly judge her achievement.
Until February 12
(020 7703 6120, southlondongallery.org)
Dara Birnbaum
South London Gallery
65 Peckham Road
SE5 8UH
