Making the most of their memories

Here, 11 international artists reveal the strange manner in which nostalgia and other nuances of memory tie themselves to the physical world, so that the simplest object can possess the most profound of emotive associations.

Gallery: See more pictures from the exhibition here

Art works serve as proxies for specific objects that may carry meaning for each of us so that, as usual, art arrives at the personal via the collective, succeeding thanks to the human mind's irrepressible tendency to project personal significance onto all it surveys.

The disparate works move through a range of atmospheres. Martin Boyce's metal and neon gratified sculptures are literally abstractions of street furniture, conjuring an urban sensibility of degraded beauty, isolation and threat.

By contrast, Ann Veronica Janssens's simple piece, a section of corrugated roof painted gold and installed so that a glow bounces off the walls, provokes hope with the simplest of means.

Elsewhere, meanings are scrambled and withheld from the viewer. In the middle of the gallery the strangest exhibit is an impressive bouquet of flowers, a work by Dutch duo de Rijke/de Rooij, created by a florist interpreting daily news articles according to a code imposed by the artists but unknown to us, so that a passage of orchids may denote pain and suffering as much as joy.

Similarly, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska's fragmented, black, angular, sculptural forms, scattered around the floor, create an alien landscape. A contemporary investigation of an old Romantic strand of thought, Stay forever and ever and ever, proves, like its subject, melancholy and attractive in equal measure.

Until 24 June (020 7703 6120).

Stay Forever And Ever And Ever
South London Gallery
Peckham Road, SE5 8UH