Matt Stokes

If art came with footnotes, Matt Stokes' 'The Gainsborough Packet' would be festooned with them. Referencing folk music's importance as a centuries-spanning cultural adhesive in Newcastle and in the Camden area around 176, it's a nine-minute music video cum costume drama, projected large and loud. Sam Lee, a toothy caricature of Coldplay's Chris Martin, sings lyrics based on an 1828 letter by a long-gone Geordie, recounting a life of alternating triumph and disaster: 'Now what think you to this, my friend Pybus?' goes the refrain, as Lee hurtles through costume and career changes while whizzing up and down fortune's ladder. Orchestrated with Northumbrian pipes, melodeons and fiddles, it's a beautifully shot and mounted (and, winningly, slightly hysterical) affair.

Another film, shot in Austin, Texas, brings his relativist point home. On one screen a punk band rips through a gear-shifting, scream-laced number; on the other, punks of various ages go wild in the mosh pit, slam-dancing to a different track. Punk and folk are each social, traditional and necessary musics, the conjunction implies, bonding people down the years, across rooms. We may be nothing without our shared enthusiasms, as a programme of in-gallery events entitled 'Club Ponderosa' underlines. A revived futurist opera was in rehearsal when I arrived: sweating in studded leather, swapping notes on traditional murder ballads, and seeing a rare slice of Russian avant-gardism stand aligned as hedges against atomisation.