'Roni Horn, 'This is me, this is you' (1998/2000) detail from installation of 12 photographs. ©Roni Horn, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich & London. Presented by the Art Fund under Art Fund International

Across a two-year period beginning from 1998, Roni Horn took photographs of her niece Georgia, that are on show in an installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. A set of prints are placed on one side of a wall, seeming to trace a path of growth as Georgia adopts a different hairstyle, posture, and way of expressing herself to the camera. Another set of prints hanging on the facing wall seems to present duplicate images, with almost imperceptible differences that are revealed on closer look. At each occasion that Horn recorded Georgia’s actions, two consecutive photographs at intervals of a few moments would be taken, giving rise to a series of seemingly double prints. While This is me, this is you documents a specific point of a young girl’s development in a spontaneous and personal manner, the series of prints provoke thought on the way our identities shift not just within the passage of two years, but also within seconds, as expressions we try on and grow into.

These fluctuations and representations that revolve around individuals and spaces in history, seem to be one of the themes emerging from Tales of the City, an exhibition now on view at GoMA that seeks to bring together artworks interpreted as responses to man-made urban spaces, from documenting changes in the city to re-imagining them, and features artworks by artists including Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Emily Jacir, Toby Paterson and Corin Sworn.

Fiona Tan, 'Disorient' (still) (2009). Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Fiona Tan’s Disorient occupies the ground floor gallery, the same space where another video work she made, Tomorrow (2005) was presented two years ago.  A two-screen installation, one screen pans slowly across a recreated depot, with the camera moving to reveal a curious assortment of objects from Asia, and a voiceover reading from the tales of Marco Polo. The facing screen pieces together commentary and footages extracted from modern-day documentaries of countries in Asia. Commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53^rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Disorient draws on the cultural history of Venice and questions the nature and reception of text and visual representations of Asia across centuries to the present.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Handprint Poster. Copyright and courtesy Hans-Peter Feldmann / Galerie Mehdi Chouakri. Photo: Jan Windszus

Handprints of well-known artists and poets in the twentieth century comprise ten posters by Hans-Peter Feldmann. These handprints were found in the notebook of psychologist Charlotte Wolff who examined the diagnostic significance of the hand and captured the handprints of famous personalities, many of whom were involved in the Surrealist movement, including Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, André Breton and Aldous Huxley. By scanning and enlarging these handprints, Feldmann offers a way of considering the aesthetic qualities from the curves and textures of each print, and an avenue of reading and interpreting the minds of these personalities.

Lothar Baumgarten, 'Unsettled Objects, 1968-69. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford' 1968-69, Slide projector, 80 slides. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

Unsettled Objects at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, reflects on how artists have examined the social and political. The exhibition takes its name from Lothar Baumgarten’s (b. 1944) installation Unsettled Objects, 1968-9. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford which probes the status of the object as it journeys into the museum, and uses the language of the museum to call attention to the ideologies of the institution the objects are placed within. Influenced by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Unsettled Objects was the outcome of Baumgarten’s image documentation and intervention through language, of the ethnographic collection and display at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Each slide visually depicting display cases and object arrangements features a word, ranging from “rationalized”, “narrated”, “valued” to “typified” that captures the museum’s attempt towards accessibility and rational classification. Unsettled Objects formed one of his studies of how several European ethnographic museums display objects and frame perceptions, and the ways objects have been uprooted from their original contexts and remain unsettled against western discourses.

Graham Fagen, 'Bell' 2006, Silk screen print. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

Graham Fagen and Emily Jacir’s works also revolve around journeys, their distinct approaches disclosing the complex historical and social issues intertwined with these journeys. Graham Fagen (b. 1966) grew up in Irvine, the hometown of eighteenth century Scottish poet Robert Burns, yet found himself drawn more to reggae than the poetry of Burns. Fagen’s Bell (2006), is one of three screenprints, each depicting the ships, Nancy, Bell and Roselle that Burns had booked successive passages on, to travel to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation. Each passage was eventually not realised, as emerging reception to his poems led him to remain in Scotland. The image of the ship, with facts of its passage, open up associations between maritime journeys, trade and slavery of the eighteenth century. The prints form one part of Fagen’s body of work which converges the life history and poetry of Robert Burns with reggae music from the West Indies, treading on the relationships between Scotland and Jamaica through the journeys (and non-journeys) of people and their legacies.

Emily Jacir, 'From Texas With Love' (2002), video, monitor, text. Copyright the artist, courtesy Glasgow Life (Museums)

From responses to the question “If you had the freedom to get in a car and drive for one hour without being stopped (imagine that there is no Israeli military occupation, no Israeli soldiers, no Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, no ‘bypass’ road) what song would you listen to?”, Emily Jacir (b. 1970) compiled an hour-long soundtrack of 51 songs selected by Palestinians living in Palestine. From Texas with Love (2002) was filmed through the rear windscreen of Jacir’s car, as she undertook an uninterrupted journey across the Texan highway, listening to the soundtrack comprising international pop songs to the Palestinian national anthem. Jacir often performs actions on behalf of those whose rights are curtailed, in this case, mobility without harassment. Visitors are able to select the track to be played, vicariously undertaking a journey which drives across the message that the basic freedom of mobility and choice while easily enjoyed in one country, is denied in another.

Unsettled Objects speaks to the potentials of politics within art, but also ponders its limits housed within an institution. The exhibition runs from December 2009  to March 2011, and other presented artists include Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jenny Holzer and Jo Spence.