Robert Kusmirowski

Beneath the Barbican's concrete towers, brick dust touches almost everything in Robert Kusmirowski's 'Bunker'. The installation purportedly attempts to activate the psychogeography of the brutalist art centre, built on a site bombed-out in the Blitz. Thus a clanking flight of iron steps descends into a military shadow world crammed with evidence of modernism's failed dreams. Mysterious out-of-date machinery is silently corroding. Soldiers' quarters house bunkbeds and two lonely johns, stained with shit-coloured flecks of rust.Even the actor tinkering away at a workbench is begrimed, as if this whole world had been excavated, rather than hand made.

While an old Evening Standard carries a headline about the bombing of Dresden, folders and medicine bottles are annotated in Polish, suggesting the post-war communist history familiar to the artist. Clearly this is no replica of any actual place, but a mythic bunker: a dreadful, secret space conflating certain histories, and accreting fictional layers through a mix of antique equipment and stuff that's been prematurely aged.

Indeed, things don't quite add up. The instinct is to rummage, while the carefully arranged dust is like a subtle warning not to touch. At the far end of the installation a canvas sheet gives way to piles of props and, an unintentional but forceful addition, an abandoned Barclays Bank balloon. What Kusmirowski's bunker ultimately suggests is that history cannot be ossified in fetishistic surface details. It remains elusive, like the curling sepia-tinted photograph of soldiers, obscured by one's own shadow when leaning in for a better look.