Harold Offeh's work is in a group exhibition called Black and White at IBID Projects, on Vyner Street in Hackney, a place that has become a mini-replica of Manhattan's Chelsea gallery scene.
Vyner Street is a gruesomely picturesque urban dumping ground of workshops, an abandoned church - and art galleries behind metal doors. To see Black and White you buzz the apparently closed gallery, they let you in off the rainy grey street. There are drawings, photographs etc by several international artists but Offeh stands out.
He shows, on a television monitor, shaky but atmospheric video footage of San Francisco, with a fantastic unearthly light on the bay. Over this hand-held landscape film, text moves horizontally across the screen relating the horrible deaths and injuries of a series of white Californians attacked by - he tells us - a gang of black separatists in the 1970s. The work is about fear and paranoia, it's about your response to it. It's about racism.
I found myself utterly fascinated. But who is it for? For me, for the middle class visitor to IBID projects? Everyone visiting the gallery happened to be white. Most people on the Hackney streets happened to be black.
Around here galleries do not announce themselves but hide behind serious doors - if they were theatres they would surely be offering outreach programmes but these are private dealers, posh showrooms, offering the frisson of being in a tough part of east London but not in any way contributing to the well-being of the community.
So here's a video about racism. But is the gallery showing it part of the problem, or part of the solution?
At the British Museum on Sunday night I happened to catch the ceremony to mark the 250th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Here was a public space so much less fashion-conscious than any of the Vyner Street galleries, making strenuous efforts to act in the world and, crucially, widen and reform its own community. So humanist, so liberal - but so much more real.
Vyner Street is a daydream. One day it will just be derelict warehouses again - and the art world will leave nothing, no seed, behind.
