'Glocal' art for 'glocal' people

Reviewed: Artes Mundi 2, National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff, Wales until May 7 (0044-2920723562)

As the title suggests, Artes Mundi 2, at the Welsh National Museum and Gallery in Cardiff, is the second in a series of international art award shows initiated in 2004. Working from an extensive list of nominated artists, two curators - Indian Deepak Ananth and Brazilian Ivo Mesquita - came up with a shortlist of eight artists whose work addresses themes of "the human form and the human condition". Work by all eight is exhibited, and at the end of March an international panel of five judges (though not including the two selectors) will award the substantial £40,000 (€58,600) prize to one of them.

Artes Mundi 2 really is international. The spread of selectors, artists, and adjudicators spans the globe. It is an ambitious initiative, and it is also an inevitable one, reflecting the need of smaller countries to tap into an art world that has in its own way been globalised for quite some time now. The ambitions of all such projects - think of the Glen Dimplex Artists Award or earlier on, Rosc, in Ireland - are to introduce a local audience to developments in art elsewhere, to shake up the local art scene, and, most optimistically, to engender a two-way traffic, to raise the profile of the host country and its artists internationally.

All of these things can happen, and certainly did happen with Rosc, for example, in Ireland's case. Some things have changed since the inception of Rosc in 1967, though. International modernism as a relatively straightforward aspirational model has given way, with post-modernity, to a more problematic though still thoroughly international model of orthodoxy. Hybridised and heterogeneous, today's globe-trotting artworks are more often than not examples of what James English has termed "glocalisation" in The Economy of Prestige, his book on the phenomenon of cultural awards. That is, they embody the ambiguous process of globalising aspects of local culture.

Much of what we see in Artes Mundi 2 fits the bill. It has to, given that the selectors were briefed to look for work by artists who had achieved a level of acclaim in their own countries and were at the stage of emerging internationally. It is a loose criterion: the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, for example, is very well established internationally, and has been the subject of a major solo survey show at Tate Modern. Ahtila makes multi-screen video installations of extraordinary quality. That is, they are the antithesis of the dreaded, interminable hand-held camcorder video that was for far too long a staple ingredient in any group show of contemporary art.

Ahtila's reference points are cinematic in terms of technical standards and narrative devices. But she also exploits her freedom from cinematic constraints in her brilliant use of multiple screens and wilfully fragmented, non-linear narratives. Her works are not short films per se. They stand more in relation to films as poems or short stories stand in relation to novels.

One of the pieces showing in Cardiff, The House, takes us into the world of a woman who may be succumbing to psychosis. Maybe, because Ahtila leaves the implications of what we see open-ended. But, it has to be said, her work to date is characterised by its archetypically Scandinavian gloom: lugubrious individuals struggle with, variously, alcoholism, emotional numbness, unhappy relationships, mental illness, suicidal thoughts. Despite which, it is hypnotically watchable, all too comprehensible and exceptionally beautiful.

When Rosc was up and running, the thorny question of Irish representation came to the fore, and a dual-track approach emerged. There is no obligation on the Artes Mundi selectors to include any Welsh residents but, the catalogue notes, both were intent on doing just that from the outset. Not too difficult, as it happens. Sue Williams, though born in Cornwall, has been based in Wales for more than two decades and is a fine artist. While her work is rooted in her superb drawing - a traditional, currently devalued skill - it is undeniably edgy and immediate. Her drawings and collaged paintings, made with fierce energy and spontaneity, offer an acerbic running commentary on the subjective experience of negotiating her way through a world in which sexuality is relentlessly commodified and gender stereotypes reinforced by market forces. She situates her work in a kind of battleground, a graffiti embellished arena of emotional rawness, cruelty and vulnerability. Surely Tracy Emin learned a thing or two from her over the years?

The German Thomas Demand is perhaps the best-known artist in the show and his work is fascinating. It consists of unsettlingly innocuous photographs of banal scenes: a stairwell, an office, a copse of trees. There is something strange about the images, a kind of bland perfection, and it derives from Demand's singular methodology. Using imagery in reproduction, he searches for a scene that inspires him, then recreates a three-dimensional model of it using only coloured paper and cardboard. He then carefully lights and photographs the model of an image and converts it back into an image.

All of which may sound like an exercise in futility, but isn't. Apart from Demand's extraordinary skill in all of this, his works compel us to look in an active, questioning, speculative way at the world around us and the myriad representations of it that we take for granted.

The Argentinian Leandro Erlich is known for making show-stopping installations that seem to defy natural laws. Alas for Artes Mundi, he seems to be in a relatively subdued mood, and has devised an atmospheric black-and-white projected installation that emulates, sort of, the experience of walking through the dappled sunlight of a forest glade. Subodh Gupta, who is Indian, makes beautiful sculptural pieces exploring questions of value and materialism. He uses ordinary objects - from domestic containers and utensils to a bicycle - and casts them in stainless steel and bronze. The result is a reinvention of sorts, a means of looking anew.

The Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung is hugely energetic in the way of many contemporary Chinese artists, who come across as being enthused by the sheer possibility of artistic exploration. Yet while what he does is never less than interesting, it is also curiously uninvolving. The Brazilian-Swiss partnership of Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg exemplify the practice of contemporary art as enactment within a social space. In other words, they engage people in interviews, conversations, monologues and actions and record the results. Again, the people are interesting, the art is much less than compelling.