Camulodunum

Firstsite Colchester 25 September to 27 January

Duckling-into-swan analogies don't do justice to Firstsite's remarkable and almost ridiculously emphatic transformation. At its former location in Colchester's genteel, modestly proportioned Minories, the institution evidenced some curatorial ambition but felt like a slightly staid and constricted operation; now, thanks to Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly's gold-skinned, curve-heavy spaceship of a building, it appears almost incongruously grand, a shiny hypertrophie statement that clearly reflects the inflated stakes for regenerative regional institutions in the wake of Wakefield's Hepworth, Margate's Turner Contemporary and Nottingham Contemporary. Like them, this place has to tether itself to the locality as well as drawing attention from outside. In this case, that has been accomplished not by referencing an indigenous artist (like Hepworth) or industry (like the lace traceries embossed onto Nottingham Contemporary's own gold facade), but by valorising the very earth beneath the visitor's feet. Condensed review: in doing so via this opening show, Firstsite has managed to ground itself with the least grating artifice and the most unobtrusive grace of all the non-London venues that have opened in recent years. (The architecture itself is another matter, but we'll get to that.) 'Camulodunum' is the Roman name for Colchester, which, established in the ist century AD, was Britain's first Roman city, and Vinoly has built upon a site where once stood a clutch of Roman townhouses. In the gallery itself, a section of glass floor reveals a rectangle of ancient mosaic. The ic-artist exhibition, meanwhile, pins itself thematically to the concept of excavation and the problems and pleasures of museology, and consistently reformulates a conceptual pendulum...