Nothing as queer as folk...

This exhibition, collected and curated by last year's Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and his fellow folk art archivist Alan Kane, is something of an anomaly.

It's meant to present a display of contemporary art/craft-making - call it what you will - yet what we get could almost be a display of the ancient ritualised arts of yesteryear (give or take a few photographs and videos).

The title itself suggests something rustic, historical and not at all relevant to modern life. We get clackety old Hooden Horses from the Whitstable Hoodeners, who perform their medieval plays on the theme of death and resurrection; we have a bizarre barrel-rolling ritual in Devon, where mad participants hike a burning tar barrel upon their shoulders and run around with it aflame on their backs; we get funny little animals made from vegetables.

It seems that Deller and Kane have scoured the little-known villages of ye olde merry England to come up with something that few urbanites would recognise as modern Britain.

Furthermore, it seems that anything can come under the all-encompassing umbrella of folk art: anti-war demonstrations, street celebrations, face-gurning competitions, wrestling champs, pipe-smoking contests, car modifications, funny shop signs (a hairdresser's shop that sportingly calls itself It Will Grow Back comes to mind), political banners, an instructive video on making a prison tattoo gun.

We also get the usual joke shop tat of fake turds, plastic fried eggs and severed limbs. There's even some clearly bonkers old gent who has turned his terraced house into a vehicle of protest, with hand-painted boards speaking out against some perceived ill-treatment by the council. The dispute has been going on for about 20 years - you have to pity his poor neighbours.

Trawling through this teeming exhibition really is just like being a tourist in your own country. A lot of what constitutes folk art in Deller and Kane's eyes used to simply be called communal activity.

Now it has become so marginalised that it's become art - of a sort.

Until Jul 24, The Curve, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2, daily 11am to 8pm, free. Tel: 0845 120 7550. Tube: Barbican/Moorgate