Zero Budget Biennial

You have to admire the chutzpah of this elegantly savvy group show currently touring European art venues under the assumed identity of A Biennial. Critic-curators Joanna Fiduccia and Chris Sharp's timely project - travelling light with no theme, programme, or cash in the real sense, just a pocketful of contemporary works they (and a panel of colleagues) rate - barely orbits the same sun as the ubiquitous once-every-other-year exhibition format we have come to know.

The bring-it-on posturing of the promo material ('The biennial to end all biennials') appears as much part of the exhibition package as the deliberate lack of discernible principles it's based on. While works such as Justin Lieberman's 'Theory of Voice-Over' that peals from the loo and Ruth Roots 'Press Release' of jpegs featuring such random things as 'ski socks' and '18th century silhouette cut-outs' bring into play particular conceits or conventions associated with the art biennial experience, time and again one is brought back to consider a contradictory view. Take Sara Barker's starved cardboard structure that shouldn't be able to stand, for example; Sally Osbourne's poetic objectification of the memory of shadows; or painter Agnieska Brzezanska's sickly invocation of Vincent blighted by Pollock-style drips and dribbles.

But, as JérÙme Saint-Loubert Bié's framed ArtForum ad on a supporting pillar reminds us, the curators' pitch-perfect drum-banging has yielded impressive results: free publicity in a major art mag is certainly something of a coup. Their major achievement though, for all the neat, funny and highly valid critical inferences their pseudo-lobbyist stance creates, is the selection: the weathervane sensitivity of the artists here points to less prominent but infinitely more engaging collective concerns than biennial exhibitionism.