Yael Bartana, Alex Frost, Laura Lancaster, Laurence Lane, Susan MacWilliam, Clara Ursitti, Matt White and Anthony Shapland

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The artists in Afterlife share an interest in capturing particular or significant moments in time ­ whether taken from their own lives, or appropriated from the lives of others, drawn from significant points in history, or reached via psychological processes of investigation. Moving between personal and collective experience, the real and the mythic, the commonplace and the unknown, there is an underlying sense of sadness, melancholy or menace evident in much of their work.

Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time was filmed in Tel-Aviv on Soldiers’ Memorial Day, a day of remembrance observed in Israel and heralded by sirens across the country. Filmed from a high vantage point, the scene is played out on a busy four-lane highway. The layers of moving images slowly reveal cars coming to a halt and the occupants opening their doors, standing by their stationary vehicles, pausing and slowly driving away. Today, in the perverse time we inhabit, the sight of stopped traffic suggests a grave situation ­ looking at the film one wonders what catastrophe these drivers can see ahead of them, what has induced their paralysis. Is it fiction or reality, and, if fiction, how could a powerless artist arrest the flow of cars, goods and people'

Alex Frost’s work for Afterlife represents a single theme played in two different "keys": drawing and sculpture. Part of a series on this theme, both pieces allude to a systematic process in their construction and appear to be in a state of stalemate. A knotted sculptural form could represent both conclusion and confusion. A meticulously drawn portrait of a figure is equally ambiguous in its representation.

Laura Lancaster’s small-scale paintings are based upon anonymous snapshots found in flea markets and junk shops. Rather than add to the world¹s ever increasing store of images she chooses to rescue these images and recycle them back into the world. She is fascinated by the fact that these once loved and precious objects have now been discarded. Her work focuses on manipulating the tension between the flat photographic image and the tangible painted surface.

Laurence Lane’s Untitled Walking Record is a 12", one-sided vinyl record consisting of recordings of the artist walking through ten cities in six countries and edited into a continuous one-hour long journey. Starting in Kassel station and finishing in Euston station this walk passes through the busy streets of Manchester, in earshot of church bells in Venice and construction sites in Porto, along the dangerous roads of Rio de Janeiro, across the Seine, into deepest Hull, past skaters on London¹s South Bank, via the warm rain of Newhaven and the red light district of Frankfurt. Pressed in an edition of sixteen, this soundtrack has been recorded to play at the pedestrian speed of 16rpm.

Susan MacWilliam¹s work examines photography and vision and explores ideas about illusion and the paranormal. Her video After Image delves into the bizarre and the extraordinary, exploring the late nineteenth and early twentieth century myth that the last image seen before death is retained on the retina of the eye. This image was called an optogram, and the art of photographing such an image, optography. The "belief" was validated by advancements in photography and scientific experiments carried out in Germany during the 1870s. After Image uses footage from Dario Argento’s obscure film Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Italy, 1971) and Gabriel Soria’ Los Muertos Hablan (Mexico, 1935) alongside footage shot by the artist. A stereoscope ­ containing a stereoscopic image observed through special viewing glasses ­ is also shown.

Anthony Shapland’s Spectate was shot in a cinema during a screening of Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s film After Life (Japan, 1998). In the film, set in a form of limbo, each new arrival must choose one memory from their life, which in turn is recreated as a film to accompany them into eternity. Shapland focuses on the audience rather than the film; a rotating camera pans at 1rpm across the audience, then pans below the screen level. Silent and stripped of all narrative, Spectate reveals only the film audience’s reactions as they respond to the story unfolding on screen. The secondary (gallery) audience of Spectate is denied the narrative of the film After Life. They are therefore situated in a different limbo: a twilight area between information sent and information received. A second film, Rise, charts a streetlamp at dusk. The lamp warms up from an initial spark, moving through grey light into an orange glow, mimicking the light of a sunrise. Combined with a soundtrack of the dawn chorus, this juxtaposition holds the viewer in a position between the onset of night and the beginning of day.

Clara Ursitti’s practice prioritises the sense of smell. For Tail, she has spent the past year exploring one of the largest and most spectacular cemeteries in Britain: the Glasgow Necropolis. Frequented by dog walkers and tourists during the day, at night it provides shelter for the homeless. Located in the East End of the city centre and entirely encircled by buildings, no one knows how wild deer came to inhabit the cemetery or how many there are. Navigating the Necropolis at night, using an infra-red night vision camera, Ursitti literally shoots "blind". Unable to see what is in front of her, she uses the limited vision of the camera viewfinder, scent and sound clues to track the deer. Far from being a city of the dead, she reveals the Necropolis to be teeming with life. The final video is accompanied by the scent of deer musk.

Matt White’s manipulation of image and concept through video results in works that incorporate deceptively simple narrative structures. Both naturally occurring and more controlled "real life" situations are recorded and edited to raise questions as to their specific complexities, as well as the medium that encapsulates them. Past Lies consists of a chilling confession brought forward by past life regressive hypnosis. It exists as much as a contemporary piece of video evidence as it does a chilling tale of rape and murder.

Afterlife is a Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne and Chapter, Cardiff collaboration and was exhibited in Newcastle upon Tyne 6-27 September.

Yael Bartana, Trembling Time, courtesy: Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. Yael Bartana text by Charles Esche, reproduced by permission.

With financial support from the Arts Council of Wales.