Visual art review: Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, From The Edge CLICHÉS are more often useful than not. The one about working with animals and children generally holds true. It's therefore a sly piece of curating that places the Danish artist Nikolaj Larsen's 1999 video My Cat And I at the entrance to Dundee ­Contemporary Arts for the Discovery Film Festival, an event aimed at young audiences. Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, From The Edge/ DashnDem, Imagine Being A World Leader Dundee Contemporary Arts In My Cat And I, Larsen tries to hold his black and white moggie still for a joint portrait in front of the camera. The cat responds not just by restless twitching and wriggling; ­every so often it opens its jaws and bites in that way that many cat lovers will recognise hurts just enough to annoy but not enough to merit medical attention. For four and a half minutes man and cat struggle, the artist resorting to accepted but not cruel strategies of cat management: the firm grip of the haunches, the grasp of the scruff of the neck. Nevertheless, you'll not be surprised to learn that the cat wins every time. I like this film for lots of reasons. Some of them are personal. In my childhood home hangs a painting of my mother as a young girl. She is holding a grey cat whose posture is unnaturally composed. This is an academic painting, for admission to the Royal Scottish Academy, and both ­human and animal portrait were part of its requirements. Of course it was impossible for a young girl to hold a cat still for longer than a couple of seconds. I've ­always loved looking at this picture and imagining the scene: my shyly smiling mother standing for hours holding not a feline friend but a large, grey coat. But Larsen's film also holds as a general essay on some of the thorny questions about "portraiture" in film, documentary and reality TV. If you hold a cat still by the scruff of a neck, is it a true picture of the cat? If a cat bites because you've made it ­uncomfortable for the camera, do you actually have a film about a biting cat? And just because the cat is in the picture, does the film tell you a darn thing about it? These questions are inescapable in Larsen's other works on show, which coalesce around ideas of migration, place and visibility. There are, for example, the huge twin screens of Rendezvous (2009), each showing portraits of migrant south Indian workers in the workshops of Dubai, placed opposite filmed portraits of their families back home in Kerala. There's an attempt here to monumentalise a hidden phenomenon, and an emotional charge to the fact that artwork presents families separated by global economics, but there's a problem about lack of narrative and context. Is picturing a problem enough? Or does it reduce the complex individual lives of these unnamed workers and their families to crude types and symbols? The same set of questions arise from two sister works, Tales from the Periphery 1 and 2, filmed in the multiracial suburbs of Gellerupparken in Aarhus and Saint-Denis in Paris and each presented as a single- screen documentary. Larsen worked in these communities giving young residents a chance to film their own footage and editing together the results. But there are weaknesses in these films: too many scene-setting shots of bleak estates viewed from the outside and no ­extended narrative about the participants. The young French people ­recite, by rote, their ethnic origins and tell the camera about their hopes and fears: it's like a beauty pageant where everyone declares their belief in world peace and you learn precisely nothing about anyone other than the shape of their face or the colour of their eyes. But there are moments when stories come alive, most noticeably in Denmark, where Lina takes us to the boxing gym, Christina talks about the despair of being separated from her mother and when a group of teenage boys descend into anarchic abuse to mask their anxiety about filming in the presence of ­older youths. In the adjacent gallery, ­London artist duo DashnDem reprise their project Imagine Being A World Leader, which trains schoolchildren in rhetorical techniques and presents the filmed outcome like a mini world summit. The eight-year-olds do better than some of our adult leaders, and some are confident speakers. Yet all are presented as anonymous, and as the film edit is constructed around the repetition of key phrases and actions rather than a single speech at a time, the emphasis is on the acquisition of technical skills rather than their effective or contextual use. What we have then is a film not about children, but about adults. An artwork that uses children, rather than works with them, to reveal the interchangeable tricks of ­rhetoric and the empty gestures politicians employ. Perhaps in the process the children of P5 at Blackness Primary had fun and expressed themselves. I hope so. But I wish like Larsen's cat they had at least been given the chance to wriggle and bite. Both exhibitions continue until 18 November. www.discoveryfilmfestival.org.uk