By titling her new exhibition “Landline,” Amy Sillman might seem to suggest a longing for the past. But no one would accuse the artist of nostalgia. The show—organized by Martin Clark and containing thirteen paintings, several groups of works on paper, and two animated videos—is set firmly in the present, and makes it clear that our politics are ruling, invading, colonizing Sillman’s mood.

The show’s first room features Dub Stamp, 2018, a suite of twelve double-sided works on paper hung on a wire cutting diagonally across Camden Arts Centre’s large, street-facing second-floor space.

“A kind of superior journalism” is how art historian Kenneth Clark once thought of Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, 1814, a brutally graphic painting of then-recent political executions. Some two centuries later, employing the latest in digital technologies, investigative artists—among them Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture, and Trevor Paglen—have fashioned themselves heirs to Goya’s repurposing of art: They seek to inform viewers of unjust and sometimes little-known current events.

Abu Hamdan gained attention last year with the audio work Saydnaya (the missing 19db),

The title of Taus Makhacheva’s exhibition “BaidÀ” is a pun: Without the accent on the A, the word refers to a name for a cheap boat used by poachers fishing in the Caspian Sea for beluga (European sturgeon), but with the accent added, it becomes Russian slang for a nonsensical or unbelievable story. The fish, an endangered species, remains the source of two treasured products: caviar and isinglass. (The latter, made from the fish’s swim bladder, is used to consolidate paint and is highly valued by art conservators.) Because of the sturgeon’s protected status, fishing for it is not only precarious