Mounira al Sohl/Sarah Forrest @ CCA, until 10 Nov

This ‘double solo show’ sees two female artists take their departure from two male-authored classics. Taking centre-stage in the largest gallery, Sarah Forrest’s video is based around Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal existentialist novel, Nausea. Shot in Forrest’s Glasgow studio, the video melds extracts from the novel with Forrest’s musings on the similarity of her own experiences and those of Nausea’s anguished protagonist. 

A nice twist to the homage is that it’s site-specific, Forrest making reference to Maryhill and the ‘real sort of West End crowd’ she encounters by the River Kelvin. In the same vein the narrators’ Scottish accents and poetic language evoke existential literature nearer home, such as Trocchi’s Young Adam.

Beautifully-shot and edited, it’s disappointing when you register that quite so many lines and moments are lifted from Sartre’s novel, making his the text around which Forrest’s work is wrapped.

Exactly how much or how little of John Cassavetes’ films have inspired Mounira al Sohl’s work Dinosaurs is difficult to tell – featuring her friends and family in Beirut, the five video sequences purposefully blur the line between acting and real life. Each revolves around the social act of drinking, the gluttonous guzzling serving to blur the boundary even more.

Shot cumulatively over a period of time, the collection do not tell a single narrative but one can make observations about the various characters. The gorgeous, brightly-coloured scenes of Lebanon are enough without trying to discover Cassavetes within them. For al Sohl the filmic reference has served its purpose, but it’s debatable what our knowledge of it adds to the videos, except to emphasise the question of whether or not the actors are acting. [Jac Mantle]