Sonica: Our Contemporaries @ Tramway

Our Contemporaries is dystopian sci-fi pared down to basic components. Mookyoung Shin’s futuristic nightmare mixes automation with bureaucracy. Rows of robotic hands count out a choreographed rhythm on a mini-tier of classroom desks. These baying digits call to mind Schwarzenegger’s metallic fingers in Terminator, stripped of skin and hungry for violence. Their furious tapping is both fascinating and grating. When their expressive beat builds to a crescendo, standing in the audience feels like being back at the mercy of school bullies. The difference is, these ones are disembodied machines from a Philip K. Dick novel – far more powerful than a bunch of mean kids.

Shin’s piece is well suited to Tramway’s hollow warehouse aesthetic. Each set of humanoid claws lights up when it plays, conjuring spidery shadows and adding to the atmospheric horror. The show is even creepier if you peer at these instruments of terror up close. They are operated by a spiralling wooden contraption which moves the digits – actually more like piano keys – up and down in turn. Such a simple-looking device behind the monstrous spectacle shores up Shin’s stated intention of exploring quotidian repetition. Seemingly innocuous items butt up against deep social anxieties, a continuing theme in the South Korean artist’s work. His back catalogue includes a model boat and anchor where the latter repeatedly fails to moor the former, and walls covered with shoes in a room filled with screaming. Just like Our Contemporaries, these suggest everyday objects utilised to create absorbing metaphors for existential fear. [Helen Wright]