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From the Renaissance to Modernity travel has represented expansion – of territories, wealth and knowledge. By the end of the 19th century the fast pace of technological change meant hazardous journeys to far flung corners of the globe, which had once taken months, even years, were made easier by the introduction of the steam train, the motor car and the aeroplane. Travel became a dominant trope of modernism, a utopian enterprise that not only promised potential riches from colonised lands but also new intellectual and cultural horizons. For explorers such as Livingstone and writers such as Joseph Conrad to travel often meant a psychological journey into the dark recesses not just of a new continent but also of the self.

In Verne´s novel Phileas Fogg, a member of the Reform Club, makes a bet one evening over a game of whist that he can travel round the world in 80 days. Presented simultaneously in two venues, the ICA and the South London Gallery, this exhibition showcases the work of nineteen artists, all of whom were born abroad but now live and work in London in an attempt to highlight the themes of technological change, colonialism and globalisation originally touched on in Verne´s novel. So far so good. But the idea for the exhibition is very much stronger than many of its parts and it simply does not cohere intellectually. For there is a fashion among curators to have an idea and then go shopping for artists to fit their theme so that the concept is often stronger than the individual or collective work.

I started with high hopes. In the lower gallery Mona Hartoum´s Map, a world map made of thousands of transparent glass marbles arranged on the gallery floor suggests both aerial travel (the sculpture is seen from above) and the precarious balance of the world´s geo-political systems, while Jananne Al-Ani´s photographs of blighted deserts and animal carcasses undercut the western desire to romanticise far flung cultures. But the upstairs gallery is visually rather dull and intellectually weak. Apart from Runa Islam´s film First Days of Spring about rickshaw drivers in Dhaka and Alexandre da Cunha´s witty Velour Series, a row of standards in which national flags have been substituted by jazzy souvenir beach towels from various resorts, the rest adds nothing much to the debate, while Rosalind Nashashibi´s exorable Circus of the Future, a series of weak punning photos on the outline of an elephant, should never have found their way out of the confines of an undergraduate show.

Down in south London things are not that much better. The gallery looks rather dreary despite Yinkare Shonibare´s colourful Man on a Unicycle which uses African batik transformed into 19th costume to illustrate patterns of colonialism. The most interesting works are Francis Upritchard´s Borrowed Carpet, which groups odd items including skulls, stuffed monkeys and a fly whisk together on a rug in a display similar to those found on the outer edges of bazaars. Reminiscent of the ethnographic displays in museums such as the Pitt Rivers in Oxford it underlines the Victorian obsession with categorising and collecting. While Erika Tan´s three screen video, Persistent Visions, which juxtaposes excerpts from amateur footage found in the film archive of The British Empire and Company is genuinely evocative and thought provoking.

The appropriation of Verne´s novel as a motif is a clever one. But the curatorial voice is too strong and the work too thin and insufficiently engaged with the theme to create what could have been a radical exhibition that looked at the complex effects of colonisation and the legacy the British Empire left behind.

Sue Hubbard is a poet, novelist and art critic for The Independent where this article was originally published.

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