It is hard to visit a gallery nowadays without being told that an artist is dealing in memory, history and place. They’re handy buzzwords - what, after all, isn’t to do with memory, history and place? - to prop up work that, lacking the sup­port­ing struts of a curator’s note, might well fall flat. One of the great pleasures of Matthew Buck­ing­ham’s first solo outing in Scotland, then, is that he is the real deal, mining the past to il­lu­min­ate the present, making work backed by deep academic research, but that stands alone, dense with ideas, and doing what art does best, burrowing into the minds of its audience, sparking off new ideas and turning old ones on their heads.

The show opens with an installed video, The Spirit and the Letter. On the wall-sized screen, a woman enters a Georgian room in period dress, and speaks, her words drawn from Mary Woll­stone­craft’s essay A Vin­dic­a­tion of the Rights of Woman, fleshed out with quo­ta­tions from other texts by the early feminist. This ghost of Woll­stone­craft paces as she talks, but not across the floor, instead walking on the ceiling.

It’s a simple enough metaphor - the cam­paig­n­ing author wished to turn the world in which she found herself upside down (or, better, to turn it the right way up). But Buck­ing­ham doubles it with a simple gesture, in­stal­ling a chan­de­li­er­ on the gallery floor, which forces us into sharing Woll­stone­craft’s upended position, first phys­ic­ally, then, as the extracts from A Vin­dic­a­tion of the Rights of Women are read, we find ourselves sharing her thoughts, which, an­a­chron­is­ms of language aside, are de­press­ingly prescient, a still-current com­ment­ary on gender politics. And Buck­ing­ham has tinkered with the tenses in his source texts, too, siting Woll­stone­craft firmly in her past, haunting our present, but also lending her words a fresh urgency. The spoken passages are also deftly chosen. Woll­stone­craft mention of the ‘silence of spacious apart­ments’ and her footfalls in them, ties the quo­ta­tions to their new context, and when she says, ‘Every object carries me back to past times, and impresses the manners of the age forcibly on my mind, for they may be con­sider­ed as his­t­or­ic­al documents.’ it is hard not to take her words as a borrowed manifesto for Buck­ing­ham’s practice.

Next, Buck­ing­ham switches his focus to the history of his medium, in False Future. A narration in French, with English subtitles, tells the story of a lost figure in the history of the moving image, Louis Le Prince, a pioneer of cinema who succeeded in capturing motion five years before the Lumiere brothers found fame in 1895. Had Le Prince not worked in secret, his efforts known only to his family, and had he not dis­ap­peared without trace in 1890 after boarding a train - the very subject of the Lumiere’s first film - the history of cinema might have stretched back further to include, Buck­ing­ham suggests, the Elephant Man’s funeral, or the massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee. And Le Prince’s fate pre­fig­ures cinematic tropes, too - the tale of a madcap scientist working secretly on a world-changing invention, only to vanish in a puff of smoke is the stuff of B feature plots. On screen, meanwhile, Buck­ing­ham recreates one of Le Prince’s few surviving films, a static shot of a bridge in Leeds, fusing past with present.

Best of all the works here, though, is Ever­yth­ing I Need. On one screen, the interior of a 1970s aeroplane is examined, almost lovingly, in a series of slow takes, most as still as pho­to­graphs. On the second, a text unfolds, the words of another figure in the history of feminism, Charlotte Wolff. We learn of her first love, her life as a doctor in Weimer-era Berlin in the company of Walter Benjamin, her exile in Paris with the Sur­real­ists, and then in Britain, all memories shot through with a quiet polemic on the status of women, and lesbian women in par­t­ic­u­lar. Each re­min­is­cence is linked to a place, whether it’s the bars of Berlin or the bus stop where Wolff realised that she must flee Nazi Germany, and so the ‘plane interior becomes a sort of non-place, or place-between-places, an in­tel­lec­tu­al interzone in which memories can unfold, free from the immediate emotional impact of familiar sur­roun­d­ings.

Like The Spirit and the Letter and False Future, Ever­yth­ing I Need is a concise portrait of an his­t­or­ic­al figure, one that informs and il­lus­trates, but one that raises more questions than it answers. What are we to think of a male artist exploring the history of feminism, or a film-maker turning his lens on film? Is Buck­ing­ham, with his precise in­stal­l­a­tions, a sculptor as much as he is a film-maker, or a new kind of por­trait­ist, his subject place and time as much as people? There are no easy answers to be found in Play the Story, and that’s what makes it such a fine show, the kind that takes up residence in every visitors memory.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 23rd, 2007.