Edel Assanti/Jack Bell Gallery/Holster Projects

Victoria has always been a dead zone for art galleries: between the Royal Academy to the north, the ICA to the east and Tate Britain to the south, if you want a work of art, your best bet is the Argos across the road (I'm not kidding - 'Abstract Geometric Metal Wall Art', £29.99). Recently, however, a clutch of young galleries have banded together to share a four-floor 1950s office building near Victoria Station, and while you might be thinking 'summer group-show hell', the current shows are worth a look in on the way to the Tate.

Edel Assanti hosts a proper curated group show 'The Marquise Went Out At Five O'Clock', launching off from an old Situationist novel, Michèle Bernstein's 'All the King's Horses' from 1960. The novel's blending of biography and fiction offer a pretext for works that tread a fine line between factual information, artifice and invention. Among the five artists' work are Noemie Goudal's staged photographs of decrepit barn interiors, which play host to constructed scenes that throw the naturalism of their settings into doubt, while Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann's video, recounting Frank Lloyd Wright's abortive masterplan for 1950s pre-Saddam Baghdad, is a surprising cut-up of internet-sourced video and voiceover, historical fact and speculation.

On another floor the Jack Bell Gallery presents a mix of works by non-western artists: voodoo-fetish inspired sculptures by Haitian artists André Eugene and Lherison; harshly impressive monochrome documentary photographs of life in Papua New Guinea by Stephen Dupont; and studio portraits by Indian photographer Manoj Joshi. Each brings its own wave of culture-shock, three corners of global art meeting in this corner of SW1.

At Holster Projects, there's a meditative solo show of large drawings and a floor pattern by American Alyssa Pheobus, texts rendered obscurely in black graphite on black paper, but in stark contrast, the basement project space hosts sound-and-video artists Adam Burton, Ben Garrod and Lee Stone, who pull together some cleverly nasty bits of sound, video and text which reek stylishly of the cultural bleakness of contemporary Britain. There's a text about Raoul Moat, which kind of sets the level. Still, five floors of new art, and most of it better than anything you can get at Argos.