Sasha Litvintseva’s beautifully observed short film Alluvion (2014) follows a group of three tourists as they meander around an unidentified city against the backdrop of daily life: where women and children take their exercise in an open-air gym and laborers hammer away in a shipbuilding workshop. Litvintseva describes, ominously, how “the film and the world around them all are disintegrating toward an Atlantean End”(1), suggesting an equivalence between the lifespan of the film and the world around it. Rather than science fiction, her tale might be closer to the factual present, just as our lives—lived more than ever through digital screens—inch closer to becoming a moving image version of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’s proposal to make a map “the scale of a mile to the mile” in his single-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946). Ultimately, Borges faults cartography’s gradual lack of precision for its failure to achieve this ideal. However, today we have begun to relate to the internet in the same way, taking it for granted much like the weather or time. Indeed, many of the eight participating artists in “World Music”—the current exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa in London—were born in the late 1980s, and therefore grew …

Long before Ali G’s Borat, Andy Kaufman was touring the East Coast with his stand-up comedy character Foreign Man, an ambiguous entertainer from a fictional island in the Caspian Sea, who, with his overtly strong accent, inept punch lines, and naïve questions, created awkward moments on stage of almost unparalleled dimensions. With staple lines like “T’ank you veddy much,” he cradled his audience in a faux security that made them simultaneously cry with laughter and far more receptive to his messages and hidden criticisms. The all-too-familiar figure of the jester embraced by comedians and artists alike is cleverly reworked in Pilvi Takala’s farcical fables about social conditioning. Through a combination of homemade reportage, hidden-camera recordings, and absurdist situational humor, Takala promotes a technique of rudimentary interaction based on deliberate confusion, misreadings, and the insertion of subtle, subversive gestures into everyday settings. In doing so, she creates characters—such as the woman dressed in a Snow White costume who is denied access to Disneyland—whose mere presence undermine modern codes of conduct. Often the artist’s body functions as a questioning presence, her gestures as subtle stumbling stones that force the people she encounters to question the logic behind their actions—causing small cracks in the …