This season, black is the new black. Despite—or, possibly, because of—its racial connotations, it’s been the noncolor of choice for an unusual number of recent London exhibitions, among them Indian modernist F. N. Souza’s black-on-black figurative paintings from 1965 at Grosvenor Gallery; Korean sculptor Meekyoung Shin’s “Untitled (Black Series),” 2013—comprising exquisite vases made of soap manipulated to mimic coal-colored ceramics—at Sumarria Lunn Gallery; and the late English filmmaker Derek Jarman’s assemblaged “Black Paintings” from the 1980s and early ’90s at Wilkinson.

In the first room of American photographer Liz Deschenes’s exhibition “Bracket (London),” a series of deep viridian photograms hung unframed in a neat row: Bracket 1, Bracket 2, Bracket 3, and Bracket 4 (all works 2013). The surfaces of these four large parallelograms, designed to reflect the light and shadows cast by the gallery’s skylights and windows, changed according to the fluctuations of the natural daylight that streamed in. The gallery’s second room contained two more photograms, silver-toned and tarnished-looking, which offered a stark contrast to the iridescence of the previous space.

Dominating the first room in Philomene Pirecki’s exhibition “Image Persistence” was a combination of three overlapping individual artworks, together best described as a mixed-media mural. The background work, White Wall, Artist’s Studio (11:22, 11:22, fluorescent light, 6-8-13), 2013, includes about a dozen twenty-by-sixteen-inch photographic posters, each showing one of two extreme close-ups of the artist’s cinder-block studio wall, upon which is affixed a snapshot of the same studio detail, all fixed atop the partially repainted gallery wall. Hanging upon White Wall were two other artworks:

At Seventeen gallery, Oliver Laric’s single-channel HD-video animation 5, 2013, was projected onto a wall built in the center of the space. The ten-minute video, presented on a continuous loop, shows a white room and a single table. This bleak environment is occupied by five computer-animated avatars, Lewis, Alice, Ada, Janus, and Sam, who take turns sitting at the table one pair at a time, engaged in rapid-fire talk, as if on a speed date. Their names suggest a multitude of references, ranging from Lewis Carroll, Alice B. Toklas, and Ada Lovelace (the mathematician and proto–computer programmer)