David Claerbout

Claerbout’s most satisfying inclusions make their slowed progress almost spiritually transporting. ‘The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment’ (2008) offers 37 minutes’ worth of digitally cross-fading stills of a man stopping an amateur basketball game to feed a pigeon; as birds swoop, he breaks into a transfigured smile, like a secular avatar of St Francis. ‘The Quiet Shore’ (2011), meanwhile, is 36 improbably engrossing minutes of black-and-white photo-studies of people on a French shoreline, its membrane of tranquil water at low tide a polished mirror. Immortals should form an orderly queue. So, though, should the rest of us. (MH)