Doubtless, strange events do permit themselves the occasional luxury of occurring, as the title of the exhibition curated by artist and musician Steven Claydon at Camden Arts Centre reminds us. But combining assorted twentieth-century and contemporary artworks around vague ideas of replication and the thingly, Claydon’s show proved disappointingly short on strangeness. Its clean fit with a dominant range of readily identifiable, easily marketable contemporary art trends rendered it generic and predictable, in outline if not always in detail. For the fashion-conscious art student, it could function

Alighiero e Boetti used to say that writing with the left hand is drawing. William Blake depicted Urizen, the Zoa (or emanation of the fallen primal man) representing repressive reason and authority, as an old man writing with both hands. In Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s video Hemispherios: Eine politische Biografie im Kontext der Chilenischen Diktaturzeit (Hemispherios: A Political Biography in the Context of the Chilean Dictatorship), 2002, the camera looks down from behind the Chilean artist, who, like an allegory of Justice, is blindfolded, and writes page after page with both hands in a