Joep Van Liefland @ Duchy Gallery

In the Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind, a magnetised Jack Black accidentally erases all the tapes in Mos Def's video store. In a harebrained attempt to conceal this from the customers, they film their own versions of movies like Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2. Dutch artist Joep Van Liefland's exhibition, entitled Video Palace #34 – Le Discours des Medias, deals with similar themes – the notion of expired, outdated formats and the cultural 'palaces' of VHS rental stores, all of which fell to the barbarian hordes of cheap DVDs and Blu-Rays, online streaming services, and The Pirate Bay. 

Liefland has made 33 prior 'video palaces' – he turns the gallery space into a recreation of a video shop and fills it with titles featuring the artist himself, with gently satirical titles such as Donald Judd Faces of Death and Splatter Orgasm. Using graphic design, vintage footage and his own films, he addresses the technical limitations of video as a format; the nature of the video shop as a liminal space, full of potential narrative choices for the viewer; the genre and thematic divisions within the video collection presented; and the potential for duplication of these titles.

With movie posters, screened footage and an incredibly detailed and lifelike interior and exterior, the shop itself is a work of art. Liefland addresses what has been termed 'media entropy' – the increasingly fast dissolution and abandonment of formerly cutting-edge technologies. He asks what we lose when we abandon a particular medium or technology and recreates some of the cultural detritus that remains, in a satirical, obscurely nostalgic fashion. Like Gondry's film, Liefland's work depends on what Jonathan Lethem termed "the ecstasy of influence" – the impulse to create art based on extant work; to remix, to 'swede.' There's a serious edge to his humour, but for 80s babies, the attraction is the joy of flicking through stacks and stacks of tapes, looking for video nasties. [Bram E Gieben]