It it weren’t for a line of text likely picked at random from a pulp fiction novel and printed across the gallery’s walls, one might struggle to understand how a box full of ribbons, the paraphernalia of airport security, and a vase half-full of vodka modulate one another’s significance. Having read it, one is fooled briefly into believing that language holds the key. In the next room, however, a video screen forces together interior shots of a traditional Korean house and Italian opera. These elements meet in neither’s geography. A shelter made from coloured acrylic partly overhangs the installation, as though to egg on the film’s undramatic edit.

Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents. Decades spent by the artist lightly underlining their arbitrary connections, however, have etched the outlines of a functional map. Gillick wants his audience to commit fragments of it to their memory. On this page of the atlas, his plea is unpersuasive.