Exhibition: Nothing Like Something Happens Somewhere, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, until September 2 2012

The Embassy of Francis Alÿs’ home country, Belgium, has helped realise this show, named after a line from a Philip Larkin poem.

In return, Alÿs gets chilly for his art, pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City in a five minute film, Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing). Initially he struggles with the bulk, until eventually the intense heat reduces it to little more than a tiny puddle on the pavement.

Canadian filmmaker Stan Denniston is also on the streets of South America for Los Soñadores (The Dreamers), a nine-channel video installation of dozing dogs in Havana.

At one point, at an unspecified cue, they all wake up and toddle off.

These sleeping dogs don’t lie, and their sudden displacement is positioned as a comment on domestic and social tensions in the country’s changing political landscape.

Ben Rivers is on typically scale-shifting form. The Coming Race, shot on a wind-up Bolex camera in 2006, has hundreds of people scrambling across a rocky mountain, shrouded in a murky haze which obscures our prospects of ever knowing whether mankind ever reached this particular summit.

Elsewhere, a sextet of sculptures, The Cookham Erratics, are Andy Holden’s “personal archaeology”, made from steel, foam and mixed knitted yarn, mimicking geology, art history, theology and metaphysical poetry.

And there are more of George Shaw’s gripping paintings, works in bronze cast cardboard by Ugo Rondinone (the sculpture Still Life (Cardboard Leaning on the Wall), and minimal portrait paintings by Maaike Schoorel, wearing away original photos to reveal something new beneath the surface.

• Chapter Gallery, Market Road, Cardiff. Open 12pm-6pm (8pm Thursday-Saturday, closed Monday). Admission free.

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