De Rijke and Rooij

Assessing a video installation is always a challenge, since generally you walk into a gallery and the film is running and there is no way of knowing whether it is just beginning or near the end. Only the most committed viewers are usually prepared to stand watching the loop long enough to discover the overall structure of the piece.

Dutch artist duo Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij present their three short films in the form of a guided tour: on the hour, every hour, a projectionist leads you through the Institute of Contemporary Arts' galleries, which ensures that you see each work from start to finish. The result is far more satisfying than the brash video encounters currently available at the Hayward (Sam Taylor-Wood) and Tate Modern (Eija-Liisa Ahtila).

De Rijke and de Rooij use 16mm and 35mm film - a rich, smooth medium, totally different in mood to the flat, cold surface of video. The depth of colour that this old-fashioned format offers is integral to the slow-moving and painterly images presented by these artists.

The two best works are each 10 minutes long, and filmed with a stationary camera. The first shows a Romanesque church in Amsterdam, recently converted to a mosque. Three men sit in the shadows, barely visible in the dark. Your eyes focus on the soaring architecture, made even more exquisite by the subtle shifts in light. The sense of time passing is even more poignant in the second film, Bantar Gebang, which shows a slum outside Jakarta at dawn. Among the fetid piles of rubbish, the day breaks, doves flutter and people begin to move about.

Nothing really happens, it just gets lighter. It's simple and heartbreaking: all this beauty amid all that squalor.

You could say that de Rijke and de Rooij are just out to aestheticise the world. Their work is certainly indebted to the venerable Dutch renaissance painting tradition of landscapes and interiors, but I sense another agenda at play. When you leave the gallery, your eyes have become attuned to another, more patient way of looking: flickers of light, pockets of colour, and the desire to take the time to isolate and contemplate one image in an otherwise frenzied and visually cluttered world.