If you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you @ The GRV

For the next 30 days, climbing the stairs to the GRV’s Studio Two takes you right into the liminal spaces at the edge of humanity – or so the kids from the MA Contemporary Art Theory at the ECA would like us to believe. With its wholly affirmative title, the international collection of work, together with the pitch behind its curation, drives home a surprisingly positive sentiment in an exhibition climate so often coloured by nihilism. If you take anything with you on your trip to Guthrie Street, let it be blind faith.

While Katinka Simonse's (a.k.a. TINKEBELL) centrally positioned, hysterically repugnant cat/dog purse sets the tone for the curators' collective thematic concerns, Erica Eyres’ wonderfully sardonic and almost prophetic mockumentary Destiny Green indubitably steals the show. The tale of the child pageant queen and her quest to become the ultimate tabula rasa is, quite understandably, already a youtube hit with over 1,500 views to its name. Less explicit in its presentation, but no less effective in its meaning, is Lorraine Sue-Fern Yeung’s poetically succinct stop-motion animation ‘Myself, My Friend and Her Lover’. Grotesque and uncanny, the personification of the abject collective hair from three separate people ties in beautifully with the mythological illustrations of Sigga Björg Sigurardóttir, each playing with notions of matter, identity and narrative.

While the intellectual masturbation of the Deleuzian addict is all very well here, the resounding triumph of the exhibition is its wryly comic undertone, resulting – I believe - in one of the most entertaining visual offerings to have graced the solemn spaces of Edinburgh in a rather long time.