Art Turning Left @ Tate Liverpool, until 2 Feb

With over 300 works, Art Turning Left at Tate Liverpool is an undertaking owed a few hours of careful consideration. The exhibition is curated around key questions intended to prompt the viewer to consider the various strategies used by artists over the last 200 years to convey their political ideologies.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s beautifully presented slide show and audio, Après la reprise, la prise (2009), shows a group of women who, after losing their jobs due to the closure of Levi’s factories in France and Belgium, collectively wrote a play about their experience. The piece brings into question the working conditions created by capitalism and people’s ability to use art to change their situation.

In the work of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid (1994), coloured graphs and charts survey a population’s choice in art, taking a satirical look at democratic polling. Similarly with Gerd Arntz (c.1925-49), whose woodcut pictograms of statistics aimed at the working class were created with the hope of contributing to a revolution. A visual language not dissimilar to the infographics favoured by governments and the public sector today, it is here used by the artists to challenge socio-political conditions of ordinary people.

The exhibition manages to move serendipitously between historical works and projects active in Liverpool today. The Tate Liverpool Collective, a project for young people in the area, has produced You Feel Like a Threat, Don’t You? for the exhibition. The zine, which is available to take away, considers the psychogeography of the space that young people inhabit in the city. This project is an interesting aspect of the exhibition, and shows Tate Liverpool’s investment in disseminating the devices used by the artists in Art Turning Left.

Aside from the big names like William Morris, Francis Alÿs and Jeremy Deller, the exhibition brings to light many grassroots projects and collectives that visitors to the Tate might not have heard of. This is the strength of Art Turning Left, and it's well worth a visit for anyone. [Ali Gunn]