In an art fair week, when it seems like everyone around is constantly discussing where they were, what they saw, and how it was, discourse is dependent on physical participation, on the encounter with art in a space, strengthening the primacy of the exhibition as a mode of experiencing artwork. While there is still a lot of thinking to be made about how display has historically shaped production and continues to do so, Frieze week in London is a great moment to assess whether there is something about the exhibition that makes it such a lasting form. So why do we still go see exhibitions? Chisenhale Gallery is showing Jumana Manna’s A magical substance flows into me (2015), a 70-minute film screened five times a day. It is an exploration of traditional local music in Palestine/Israel, based on Manna’s research into the work of the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892-1939) in Mandatory Palestine. Manna plays radio recordings made by Lachmann on an iPhone to the participants in her film, ranging from a young Jewish musician singing the Arabic songs her Moroccan grandmother taught her to a Palestinian flute maker who explains that traditional Palestinian music is more fashionable in the West …

The crossed hammer-and-sickle insignia of the Bolshevik revolution has a sense of certainty to it. But it’s an old design, and a lot has happened since it first declared the coming triumph of the proletariat. So Marks (2011) the first work you see on entering Frith Street Gallery, has a sort of shock-value to its reworking of the symbol, opening up an idea that had seemed relegated to history. Set into a large mirrored rectangle is an array of red lights in the shape of an exclamation mark (standing in for the hammer) and a question mark (for the sickle), with the two forms lighting up in slow sequence. No longer the herald of the revolutionary momentum of 1917, in the hands of New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective the hammer-sickle form becomes a brilliantly succinct visual pun, which crystalizes the acute sense of uncertainty that courses through the current turmoil of the global political present. It’s a mix of exclamation and confusion that knows what it rejects but cannot define what it wishes to claim. There’s an urgency in the demands for something new, but what? These recent works by the collective aren’t agitprop, however. Rather, they variously express the group’s …