How can art improve the lives of communities affected by the cost-of-living crisis, years of underinvestment in public services, and the brutality of open markets? Wrong answers only because Webb-Ingall has already turned this group of migrants, minimum-wage workers, and local activists into low-grade animated content. 

Aesthetically, his 15-minute film which the gallery hopes will inspire or agitate viewers, is akin to the verbose, AI-generated web blogs one has to wade through on cooking recipe and instructional websites before finding the content of interest. Politically, it’s a technocrat’s call masquerading as a grassroots protest banner, cloaking impotence with pseudo-radical verbiage that has done no one any good, ever.

Peer sits a block away from the Job Centre, where many of this exhibition’s target audience supplicate themselves in return for meagre state handouts. A minute’s walk in the other direction is a branch of the citizens’ advice service, where the same appellants learn to cope with this system. Webb-Ignall can’t decide which of these two he’d rather show his work at. In the gallery, he replicates the failings of both.