Before Mike Marshall photographed the scene depicted in Concrete Pavement (all works 2003), it’s quite possible that nobody had ever seen it. Hardly a coup, you might think, since there’s not much to see—an almost abstract expanse of pitted silver gray stone, given comprehensible scale and the faintest of festive airs by fallen leaves (from London plane, that tree beloved by European urban planners because pollution can’t kill it). But that is precisely what makes the spot ideal for this British artist, whose interest lies in anatomizing and reversing the optical hierarchies that preselect

Placebo, 2002, a DVD projection by the London-based Dutch artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, is loosely based on the notorious case of Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who masqueraded as a physician and World Health Organization researcher for many years before murdering his family when his fiction was about to be exposed—the same fait divers that also inspired two films, Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) and Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (2002), itself taken from Emmanuel Carrère’s 2000 novel of the same name. Placebo’s first-person voiceover narrative emanates from within the dim