The Artes Mundi Prize, the UK’s biggest single award for visual art, opened its exhibition of shortlisted artists today in Wales’ National Museum Cardiff. Now in its fourth edition, the biannual prize, which will be announced in May, gives £40,000 to an artist from outside the UK who ‘stimulates thinking about the human condition and humanity’.

A broad remit, you might imagine. However this year, the two selectors, Levent Çalikoglu and Viktor Misiano, chose eight artists from around 500 nominations, all of whom make work in a fairly narrow vein of socio-political documentary. Of these, Adrian Paci and Yael Bartana are, in the UK at least, probably the most well known, and represent two poles within this spectrum of approaches: Paci, with his lyrical brand of realism, summons haunting images that invoke the political through personal perspectives, while Bartana instigates often absurd, darkly humourous and even satirical events that ask big questions in bold, broad-brush terms. Both of them rely on film as their primary medium, and neither of them deserves to take away the grand prize.

Film, video and photography – the default media of documentary – pervaded the exhibition. In some cases, as with Kyrgyzstani artist duo Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, the artist’s treatment of their subject matter doesn’t seem to extend far beyond National Geographic-style photographs of remarkable locations. Elsewhere, as with the videos of Ergin Çavusoglu or Chen Chieh-jen, elegantly composed but lengthy shots have a tendency to border on the ponderous.

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I have just got back from a trip to Dublin. There has been a lot of talk about the city’s fall from economic grace – indeed it certainly felt different to my last visit, three years ago, at the pinnacle of the upswing. However, despite the prevalence of plywood nailed over shop-fronts around the city centre and seemingly halted construction projects, the city’s galleries were open for business.

My first stop was to Mark Garry’s show ‘another place’ at Kerlin – his first with the gallery. He claims to have been planning this exhibition at the notoriously long, thin space for a couple of years now, and two of the pieces in the show – a half-spectrum of coloured threads bouncing from side to side of the gallery, and a string of beads that rose from a spiral on the floor to the high ceiling – made dramatic use of its dimensions. Garry seems to stretch formal concerns of material transformation and craftsmanship to devotional, even religious, extremes.

Almost next-door, Douglas Hyde Gallery was showing a selection of paintings by the young Dublin-based painter Ciaran Murphy. Although they seemed to subscribe to a familiar and fashionable style – modest-sized oil paintings in washed-out colours taken from an eclectic range of photographic sources – they are, nevertheless, at their best both endearing and unnerving. Animals, such as a herd of woolly mammoths, seem impossibly melancholy, while snatches of landscape are remote and elegiac.

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