Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2002, is Britain’s leading practitioner of what might be described as “socially engaged art” – although it is a description that makes him sound considerably more dreary, and worthy, than he actually is. His new exhibition, in the splendidly remodelled galleries of that gleaming modernist masterpiece, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, is a light-heartedly labyrinthine, abbreviated retrospective of his multifarious activities – which include documentary film-making, photography, poster design and performance, among much else.

Deller is a peculiarly faithful modern exponent of the principles and agitprop tactics of the Dada movement. Like many of the leading Dadaists, he is perhaps above all an impresario of the unexpected event. He remains best known for a “work” – for want of a better term – conceived and executed in 2002, to which he gave the title The Battle of Orgreave. This consisted of a full-scale reenactment, employing a cast of thousands, of the notorious pitched battle between pickets and police that took place near the Orgreave coking plant, in 1984, at the height of the miners’ strike. Professional reenactors were used, but many of those involved in the original conflict – both on the miners’ and the police’s side – also took part. It was documented by one of Deller’s collaborators on the project, the film-maker Mike Figges, whose unpredictable and affecting hour-long record of the event is being shown on a continuous loop in one of the central galleries in the present exhibition.

The show opens, however, with a series of documentations of some of Deller’s other activities – lending it the cheerful, rough-and-ready feel of a kind of anarchist’s archive. We Are The Mods is a slide-show record of an earlier project at the De La Warr Pavilion, an...

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