Shoving words down your throat

It's not often you are confronted with the question, "Don't you just hate this shit?" as soon as you enter a gallery.

But then it's not often that Barbara Kruger shows in London, and this is just one of the many slogans that make up her installation Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust. Kruger first came to prominence in the Eighties, with a distinctive style of photo-text montages - her most famous work being an image of a hand holding the slogan, "I shop therefore I am" between finger and thumb.

Because her work is almost always political, explicit and direct she is often defined, rather too simply, as a "femi-nist artist" and a "quintessentially Eighties" artist in style. But these dismissive categorisations belie the power of her work in general and this piece in particular.

Much of the power of this piece comes from sensory overload and overwhelming scale. As soon as you walk into the long and lofty space of the South London Gallery, you become powerlessly immersed in Kruger's world.

The room is dark, lit only by projectors beaming text onto the walls and floor and the glow of three large screens that sit in shallow tunnels set into the wall immediately opposite you. Huge talking heads fill each screen, their speeches merging and mingling in a cacophony, sound coming from every direction.

The blocks of text change every 10 seconds and different faces fill the screen in rapid succession. After a moment the dislocation dissipates. Sentences emerge from the walls. The speeches disentangle themselves from each other.

The narratives that emerge deal with issues central to Kruger's concerns, individual insecurity and inadequacy in the face of the images of perfection relentlessly plastered onto our psyche by our media-saturated consumer culture. One block of text, speaking with the voice of conceited celebrity, castigates the viewer for being "almost famous, almost loved".

Other voices are those of the victims of our celebrity culture - the poor, the ugly, the old, the disfigured - and they are voices of desperate aggression and selfishness. No one is spared the gaze of Kruger's baleful eye. Least of all us, as, casting our own eyes around the room, we realise the cheap sentiments are all too familiar.

Barbara Kruger/Pleasure, Pain, Desire, Disgust: Until 18 March. South London Gallery , 65 Peckham Road, SE5 (020 7703 6120).