Sue Tompkins and Claude Cahun @ Inverleith House

Sue Tompkins' work seems made for the space. It sits silent and thinking in the domestic cathedral heart of the Botanical Gardens that is Inverleith House. Indeed, her text-based performances, for which she is best known, display a real interest in both nature and the heart. Remarkably resonant in the setting, her type-written text work asks us to "find beauty", to "look at the berries hanging on always", and concludes, with perhaps the most final of phrases, both resigned and accepting: "OK MUM".

These lines are mere strands of the audio-visual culture mash-up that constitutes her playful work, however. She responds to a world where information, sound, and images blur into a flow or a flicker, passing the eye and ear at a considerable rate. Tompkins' work extends an implicit invitation to the viewer to stop, listen and look – at the world as well as her art.

Perspective is also under consideration in Claude Cahun’s work. An important, avant-garde, female artist, Cahun was working within post-modern paradigms of identity – the split self, rather than the centred, coherent subject – as early at the 1920s. Her photographs make the world strange, or rather they display the world’s strangeness.

A 'foremother' of Cindy Sherman, viewing almost fifty self-portraits of Cahun would make spotting her in a group photo no less difficult. This is due to the performative nature of her work: in some she parodies the feminine masquerade, clown-like with make-up, while in others she dresses as a man with a shaven head. She proves the search for identity to be a timeless struggle as she reveals and revels in its construction. Her work speaks of the failure of photography to capture reality, while also declaring its worth as a conduit for being and seeing. Fifty years before Tompkins was even born, Cahun was examining the flow and flicker of life and paving her way.