British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, review: Perplexing show isn’t quite the best of British

The 42 artists' work can be enthralling, boring and some of it just leaves you in the dark

Road show: ‘The Kipper and the Corpse’ (2015) by Stuart Whipps (Jonty Wilde)

In a pink and turquoise room, a screen shows a wide-eyed blonde girl with red cupid bow lips sing an X Factor-style performance to a row of three creepy old judges dressed in synthetic pinks and baby blues. Rachel Maclean’s film Feed Me is a disturbing performance of exploited childhood and child-like adults with the occasional nasty granny, each character played by the artist. Beneath smiley faces, fake happiness and expressions of love, the brats and talent show judges are out for themselves.

It’s one of the more engaging pieces within the eighth British Art Show, which every five years sets out to explore what contemporary artists in Britain are up to. There are a few general themes: artists with social or political concerns, or those who eschew the digital age to make slow, hand-crafted objects but the overarching theme is materiality, which the curators say is about how artists engage with the material world. This seems to mean that it’s as much about objects and materials, as ideas.

Jesse Wine’s ceramic painting The Whole Vibe of Everything shows a Japanese scene made up of squares like tiles with shimmered bronze glaze. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings line one wall of an upstairs gallery, each an imaginary figure painted in a day. Her brush marks are visible and without the perfection of high finish, they almost reveal how she does it.

There are collaborations with artists who make things to be used. Alan Kane has transformed gravestones into rather morbid seating for gallery visitors. Ahmet Ogut commissioned previous British Art Show artists Liam Gillick, Susan Hiller and Goshka Macuga to make sculpture as money boxes with which to collect donations towards student debt. Macuga’s telescope, with a slot for a pound, looks out over the skyline from Leeds Art Gallery.

Usefulness has not eclipsed highly conceptual work such as a contribution from the artistic duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. They assigned a police forensic team to analyse Freud’s couch, from which they gathered DNA, dust and hair particles, which included traces of Freud’s early cases. These images become a slide show and are transformed into a tapestry the exact size of the original throw that covered Freud’s couch.

Ideas move from brain to body with wall pieces by Nicolas Deshayes. Made of industrial materials, they’re clean, pink and shiny but the splodged-out tubular shapes look like human intestines. There’s a living sculpture of sorts with an elaborate arrangement of tubes within Anthea Hamilton’s Perspex sculpture, which contains an ant farm.

With 42 artists on show there’s much to see, within a vast network of gallery rooms. The work can be enthralling, boring and some of it, such as Laure Prouvost’s singular artwork – which switches all the lights off in a downstairs gallery to play a recording of her voice as a computer hard drive – just leaves you in the dark.

To 10 January (britishartshow8.com) then touring to January 2017