Thomas Hirschhorn's reputation as a Swiss artist determined to explore the harshest and most alarming aspects of contemporary life made me brace myself for the upcoming encounter. But even before I entered the exhibition, a bleak and ominous spectacle confronted me on the pavement.
Normally, the Stephen Friedman Gallery's two wide windows offer an enticing view of the serene, warmly lit room within. Hirschhorn, however, has stacked breeze-blocks behind the glass, from ground level almost to the ceiling. Tightly coiled barbed wire lies on top of this grim barrier. Photocopied sheets of paper dangle from the gaps between the blocks, bearing texts with tantalising references to Deleuze and Foucault. Crude attempts have been made to plug the holes in the wall with dried yellow foam, but this does not prevent a doll's naked feet or two colossal male heads from jutting out. Viewed from behind, with black hair crudely painted on their raw, pink skin, these enigmatic men look like victims of some unexplained catastrophe. And the gallery premises as a whole resemble a beleaguered building in a war zone, all the more disconcerting when compared with the sleek, untroubled entrance to Conde Nast International next door.
Inside, the air of urban emergency intensifies. Instead of a floor, rough wooden planks stretch down a passage as narrow as a trench. Black spotlights perched on poles dazzle us with their glare, as if bent on guarding the gallery against intruders. Fake cardboard walls line either side of this increasingly claustrophobic corridor. Pieces of text are plastered at intervals, including philosophical utterances by Marcus Steinweg on the ubiquitous Foucault. "Care for the self" reads one; another refers to going "through the experience of one's own extreme". But the apparent optimism of these words is countered by black circles of dribbling paint akin to bullet holes.
Lower down, one section of wall has been spattered with disturbing photographs culled from newspapers and magazines. In one of these images, a semi-naked African fighter strides across a street with a bazooka balanced on his shoulder. Nearby, a young woman sprays a high defensive wall with the angry words "Ghetto" and "Israelis against the war", while a more subdued photograph shows an anxious and weary refugee family huddled in a dimly lit tent. The most unnerving picture focuses on disconsolate figures picking their way through the rubble of a pulverised house. Their melancholy concern reminded me of television shots of the rescue workers in Madrid struggling to retrieve the dead and injured from the mangled remains of the bombed trains.
But Hirschhorn does not offer us breaking news or a documentary programme. He calls his installation Unfinished Walls, and "poor materials" are deployed here with a keen sculptural understanding of their ability to generate feelings of obstruction, denial and helplessness. The sense of entrapment becomes more acute when we turn right and find ourselves negotiating still more confining and tor-tuous territory. Paths open up before us in several confusing directions, and yet they all terminate in cul-de-sacs. A tanned mannequin protrudes from a wall, his proportions echoing the classical ideal of the human form. But strips of brown tape have been crudely applied to his body, suggesting the presence of wounds we cannot see, and his head is missing altogether.
Indeed, the only faces visible in this labyrinth belong to men who must have been decapitated. High up, a bald head gazes out, his eye sockets stained black as if through scorching. At one point the wooden floor breaks off, revealing an area below where a large plastic bag bulges with unidentifiable detritus. We begin to feel like detectives, penetrating a place where appalling crimes were once committed by a brutal regime.
Suddenly, our progress is arrested by a heap of discarded gilt-bound books, including several copies of Henri No-gueres's Histoire de la Resistance - a call to revolution that sounds futile in this context. Wherever we wander, treading carefully to avoid falling off the planks and scratching ourselves on the sharp bones or barbed wire, the faces of bewildered babies and stunned adults loom out of the walls. Sometimes the repellent yellow foam around their heads gives them an absurd appearance, like extravagantly bewigged actors performing historical dramas. But the overall mood is inescapably resonant of the present, with isolated words ominously referring to "oceanic chaos". Perhaps they link up with another quotation further on, describing how "the islands rise and die, quietly come, quietly go".
I wondered if Hirschhorn wants us to make connections between the waning of marine life and our own predicament. In one corner of his installation, the texts refer to "namelessness and facelessness", as well as the possibility that "the withdrawal of the human being has already begun". Such a future seems to chime with the futility of the mannequin who, leaning out from one wall, almost touches a head as gigantic as a carnival mask.
Three years ago, Hirschhorn transformed the same Mayfair gallery into a vinyl-floored launderette, replete with washers, dryers and heaped copies of Knitting Weekly. This time, he has created a far more hellish environment in which only mournful fragments of civilisation survive. On my way out, I catch sight of another news photograph, this time showing a boy walking past a wildly handled wall painting of a bus being blown apart, hurling its silhouetted and dismembered passengers through the air. Then my eyes come to rest on a picture taken through the shattered wall of a house. Inside, a man crouches in prayer with his head touching the ground. His anguished sincerity cannot be doubted. But even the most devout entreaty to a god will not be enough, now, to redeem the profoundly damaged world that Hirschhorn holds up for our inspection.
Thomas Hirschhorn's Unfinished Walls is at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London W1 (020 7494 1434) until 8 May
