Beauty of the countryside

In Darren Almond's film Bearing, a man moves through rocky, uneven terrain, but since the camera is focused on a close-up of his face you can't tell whether the man is riding a mule or walking.

Eventually you see that the man is on foot and lugging two heavy baskets filled with yellow rocks slung on a pole. As the camera moves further out you follow the rest of his journey down to the hellish sulphur mines of Java, where he is occasionally obscured by poisonous fumes.

It should be an ugly and bitter picture of exploitation, yet there is a contrast between the degradation and the strange beauty of the landscape, a contrast more ambivalent in Almond's three-screen film In The Between, also showing at the Parasol Unit.

The central image is of Buddhist monks, with two outer screens showing images that recall another sort of exploitation, that of territorial expansion in the form of a new bullet train from China to Tibet.

Although we may get uneasy intimations of the portrayal of some kind of nobility through suffering, Almond's photographs at the White Cube offer no such unease, just breathtaking beauty - the British countryside looking more ethereal than it might ever look to the naked eye, shot under a full moon and on a very long exposure.

Darren Almond: Fire Under Snow
Parasol Unit
Wharf Road, N1 7RW