''Don't misinterpret what I'm saying," cautions one of the protagonists of Omer Fast's video installation Godville, currently showing at the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in east London. "You won't be able to get the meaning of what I'm saying, 'cos you're too occupied with my words," he says later, adding to the web of confusion already ensnaring viewers. Editing videotapes of human speakers, laboriously slicing and splicing their [...]

By now in Venice, the sometimes poor but usually tired and huddled masses of art professionals who attended the preview days of the city's biennale will be long gone. The works they queued to see (for example, Pipilotti Rist's hit Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a lush video work that paints the Chiesa di San Stae's vaulted ceiling with images of naked nymphs and rainbow-coloured plant life, or Annette Messager's loopy, Lion [...]

During the Venice Biennale in 2003, naively drawn flyers were to be found scattered around the city. They invited artist-curator couples to compete in a race for a glittering prize: invitation to the biennale's ritziest preview parties. But this was no ordinary hundred-metre dash: the "Curator Lifting-Running Competition" - brainchild of the French artist Colonel - required artists to race with curators piggybacking on their shoulders. The race may never [...]

Most British art since 1990 has been spectacular, shocking and aimed at a niche market of filthy-rich private collectors, right? Wrong, but the caricature dies hard. The rule that art, to be newsworthy, must convert into a quick burst of titillating copy tends either to sideline subtle, multi-layered projects or compress them into the standard formulas. Tomoko Takahashi, whose work is bringing the Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens to [...]