Trauma is a word we hear every day, whether it’s gulped out by the square-jawed hero of the latest hospital drama or trotted out on a TV psy­cho­an­a­lys­is phone- in. Our personal traumas, meanwhile, are mediated through memory, filed and sorted in a bid to cope with the shocking.

The DCA’s latest show plots a course between the personal and the col­lect­ive, filling the ex­hib­i­tion space with both med­it­a­tions on our voyeur­ist­ic con­sum­p­tion of disaster and documents of private loss. This pincer approach to the traumatic is made plain from the off.

As you enter the first cramped gallery space, Martin Boyce’s Now I Got Worry (Storage Unit) guards the entrance to the show. The con­struc­tion is a copy of an Eames shelving unit made up of hand- daubed signs bearing the words that follow disaster: Go Home There Is Nothing 2 See. These slogans, in­ter­rupt­ing the lines of a damaged take on a design classic speak of the capacity for tragedy to intrude on the cosy and domestic and they admonish the rub­ber­neck­er­ for his in­st­inc­t­ive peek. On the wall opposite, Maria Lindberg’s in­com­p­lete, fragile drawings of dis­em­bod­ied fingers, or oblongs captioned “abused drawing”, ignore the outside world, providing little clue as to the events that inspire them but clearly ar­t­ic­u­lat­ing a sense of pain dulled over time.

And so it goes on. Johan Gri­mon­prez splices together TV footage of hi­jack­ings while a gruff narrator quotes Don DeLillo (“Nothing happens until it is consumed “) and chase-scene funk plays in the back­ground, sim­ul­tan­eously pointing out the media’s role in con­struct­ing responses to in­ter­n­a­tion­al disasters and taking on that role through the adoption of the tech­n­iques of doc­u­ment­ary film- making. Martin Boyce charts similar terrain with images that call to mind crime-scene pho­to­graphs, save for the fact that there are no crimes to be seen.

By way of contrast, Guillermo Kuitca draws on a family history of dis­place­ment and diaspora. His People On Fire is a map of names, like a family tree charting deaths and dis­ap­pear­ances instead of cel­e­b­rat­ing birth and marriage. Many of the names are obscured, and the edges of the canvas blur into black, as if Kuitca has started a project he can never finish.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, meanwhile, bridges the gap. His stripped- down text-based pieces are personal med­it­a­tions on col­lect­ive response. By placing stacks of his unlimited print runs in the gallery to be taken away by the public, he asks us to share his work and the grief that prompts it but he has us collude in the voyeur­ist­ic con­sum­p­tion of tragedy at the same time. Trauma, then, is a show that truly engages with its subject thanks to a fractured narrative. It guides the viewer through some tricky terrain, demanding empathy one moment, only to throw that empathy back, branded as a false response conjured by media ma­n­ip­u­la­tion. In short, a walk around Trauma is like watching the rescue workers frant­ic­ally digging live on CNN, only to find yourself trapped in the mudslide.