Siemon Allen is a South African artist who has been living and working in the United States for the past thirteen years. Among other things he has, for the last eight years, been exploring and recording the imaging of South Africa through various mediums. Formerly from Durban, Allen recently returned to his home town with three major exhibitions: 'Stamps', 'Newspapers' and 'Records'. These three collections-of-objects/bodies-of-work were exhibited in large scale installations, 'Records' at Bank Gallery and 'Newspapers' and 'Stamps' at the Durban Art Gallery. Collectively titled 'Imaging South Africa' and part of an even broader project of the same name, the collections explore the ways South Africa images itself (the 'Stamps' work), how it is imaged externally (the 'Newspapers' work) and lastly how it is in imaged in dialogue with a system of global production (the recording music industry in the case of 'Records').

'Records', which included a copy of nearly every release of every recording the late Miriam Makeba ever made (bar her early work which is recorded on almost impossible-to-find '78s) was opened by music critic Richard Haslop who gave a typically blunt appraisal of Makeba's recording career. Haslop's not a fan of Makeba's (she's too commercial and obvious for him, although he does rate Sangoma as possibly the finest South African album ever produced) but he is a huge fan of vinyl records as a medium. Although the exhibition also included CDs and vinyl singles, Haslop spoke beautifully about what a vinyl record is, it's objectness, its analogueness, and the way in which records contain something that is no longer part of modern media ... ownership.

These were some of the things that informed a body of work that was remarkably simple yet contained so much. Allen had arranged all the records in a giant arc of plastic sleeves which curved through the entire main room in Bank Gallery, the collection as modernist sculpture, room installation. This trick ÔøΩ of turning information (the records, stamps and newspapers are all archives in the most obvious sense) into structure ÔøΩ works beautifully, although 'trick' is possibly too light a word for what Allen does in his remarkable use of presentation as artwork. Although the actual records were not on show, their labels were; colour prints of each side of all the records forming a massive grid on the facing wall. In the anterior space of the gallery, three old records were reproduced in supersized dimensions on tiled A3 sheets, the grooves and scratches of the records made almost physical by the magnification and the velvety texture of Allen's digital prints.

In 'Stamps', the individual objects are small enough to reduce to cells of colour, and the process of pixelation and aggregation becomes more obvious. This piece is pointedly modernist and makes direction reference to Mondrian with its grid-like flow of colour; yet it also calls to mind the arguments around Modernism as Colonialism, both politically and intellectually. The work is also resonant of tower blocks filled with office cubicles... Modernism's great, inglorious dead end. The Modernist grid and its windows were present also in 'Newspapers', which consists of a collection of pages from five major American newspapers in which there is any mention of South Africa. The pages are covered with thin transluscent paper with windows cut out to reveal the South African stories. Like the other two bodies of work, the effect is monumental, while at the same time the exhibition's actual contents could fit into a few cardboard boxes.

All three works are explicitly political in their exploration of how a country defines itself and is defined through visual and verbal associations. Stamps are an obvious expression of nationhood and 'Newspapers', together with Allen's beautifully-rendered pie charts, reveal the impact of South African reality on an American planet. And Makeba is of course one of our most potent political symbols when she's not being dumbed down as a concatenation of national jingles.

The three exhibitions were installed and presented with such consummate craftsmanship, and conceptualised with such careful consideration, that I found it difficult to even put on my critical hat: so perfectly formed, so exactly what they were, that it's difficult to suggest that they could have been any different. This is partially because Allen is so obsessive, and partially because we are automatically less disposed to be analytically critical about archive than we are about art. And in truth the work of Siemon Allen fits into its own discipline, its own world, even as its designated job is to catalogue the residue of consensus reality.