Steve McQueen's Gravesend, 2007, which premiered at this year's Venice Biennale and is currently on view at the Renaissance Society, charts a return of the repressed: Capitalist economies may have moved into an "information age," but this seventeen-minute 35-mm film proves that their machinations still make demands on the earth and on the laborers who work it. Gravesend lyrically (if abstractly) shows that, whereas nineteenth-century colonial powers sought diamonds and other traditional resources, our current appetite is for coltan, a dull black mineral used in capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics. What is to be inferred from the gorgeously composed, monumentally scaled high-definition projection is that greed for this material has contributed to the political instability and the military occupation of the Congo, an area that has seen uninterrupted conflict since well before its 1960 liberation from Belgian rule. Juxtaposing an animated fly-by of the Congo River with footage of workers sifting through dark earth and robots processing the procured material in a pristine, brightly lit laboratory, the film's disjunctions allegorize the very real economic, social, and physical distance this material traverses as it moves from the third to the first world. Its final sequence, a time-lapse shot of a sun setting behind smokestacks, brings everything full circle, rendering visual a scene described at the outset of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Unexploded, 2007, shown on a nearby monitor, is a minute-long film documenting the damage wrought by an unexploded bomb that fell on a building in Basra, Iraq. It unexpectedly calls to mind Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect, 1975, which makes the viewer squeamish about drawing aesthetic connections in the face of real-world violence.

McQueen has two concurrent exhibitions in London. At the Imperial War Museum is Queen and Country, 2007, his much-discussed and critically acclaimed response to the war in Iraq. Commissioned by the museum and the Manchester International Festival, the work's simple sculptural form—a cabinet with sliding drawers that contain mock-ups of stamp sheets bearing images, overlaid with a silhouette of the queen's profile, of each British soldier who has died in the conflict and whose family agreed to participate—achieves the potent sobriety of other recent war memorials without lapsing into the abstraction that has marked most of them since the unveiling of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982. The installation also contains a large painting by John Singer Sargent that dramatizes the distance between soldiers' sacrifice and the barely interrupted nature of citizen life, a disconnect that has grown only wider in the ninety years since the canvas was painted.

At Thomas Dane Gallery, McQueen presents a new 16-mm film, Running Thunder, 2007. A horse with a somewhat distended belly lies on its side, its glassy, lifeless black eye pointed directly at the camera lens. It is an image of such transfixing stillness that only the point at which the film loops, returning to the scene the sunlight that has imperceptibly faded over the course of ten minutes, reminds one that time has not paused on the animal's behalf. The fallen beast calls to mind the beatific donkey in Robert Bresson's classic film Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and the quintessentially British canvases of late-eighteenth-century painter George Stubbs. Seen in the context of Unexploded and Queen and Country, one can't help but think of this fallen beast as a foil to the heroism the animal's presence in art frequently implies. McQueen's seductive yet unflinching examinations of the complex, often contradictory impulses of our present moment are nearly unmatched and to be both savored and contemplated.