At the Alliance Franí§aise until September 28

This small exhibition of contemporary Latin American art appears in the most unexpected of places. Del Caos a la Búsqueda del Equilibrio (From Chaos in Search of Equilibrium), which looks at selected photographic and video works by Gustavo Daniel Kortsarz, Manuel Piña, and Julia Rosa Uribe, is installed in a basement auditorium at the Alliance Franí§aise. Located at 6161 Cambie Street, the French-language institute sits far from the centre of town and close to the hell that is Canada Line construction. The show was designed, however, to complement the fifth annual Latin American Film Festival, which took place recently at three downtown venues.

The struggle to get to this geographically and culturally displaced exhibition is worth it, and in some ways parallels the expatriate condition of the three artists. Uribe, a Colombian photographer based in Mexico City, has created a short video, Amarillo, and a series of black-and-white photographs, "42". The latter title alludes to the patient number assigned to her while she was hospitalized for cancer treatment. It also refers to the number of prints in the series, 15 of which are on view here. Grey, grainy, and sometimes intentionally out of focus, the images are of prosaic objects in Uribe's hospital room, including a call button, a clock radio, trays of partially eaten institutional food, and a pillowcase covered with shed hairs, the consequence of chemotherapy. The photos are sombre without being stark: suffering is juxtaposed with curiosity and creative commitment.

Kortsarz, an Argentine artist based in Paris, is showing A los 40, an experimental video projection that addresses midlife anxieties and the passage of time. Installed on the stage of the auditorium, up a high step and behind a thick curtain, the work is an exercise in self-scrutiny formatted as a diptych. The left-hand panel rapidly slides past 365 overlapping, passport-style head shots of Kortsarz, taken daily through the artist's 40th year. The right-hand panel shows the same rapid succession of morphing self-portraits, but breaks them up digitally into moving abstract and semipsychedelic patterns of colour, line, and texture. Through these visual disturbances, Kortsarz undermines the work's indexical nature and, perhaps, the aging process, too.

Piña, a Cuban artist who lives and teaches in Vancouver, is represented here by Untitled, a video projection that poses the question, "How long can a photograph remain still?" The artist reverses the still-photograph tradition by focusing his unmoving digital camera upon a subtly moving scene. Many of his shots are exteriors played over by flickering light and shadow, and the effects of wind. A dried leaf flutters and blows away; a rag stirs languidly atop a broomstick; a plastic bag rolls across the projected image. Other forms of movement are also caught by Piña's unmoving camera: people, animals, and vehicles pass by, machinery gyrates behind a chainlink fence, and reflections overlap on windows and shiny walls. In a concept-driven age, Piña's images are surprisingly lyrical and formalist.

An elegiac mood informs all the work here, bringing curatorial cohesion to a project that otherwise juxtaposes three distinct and far-flung art practices.