Nachleben - Group Show: Prinz Gholam, Hélène Delprat, Alma Feldhandler, Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo, Jonas Weichsel, Rafael Domenech

Aby Warburg used the word Nachleben, afterlife, for what happens when a gesture outlives the body that first made it. He was not describing influence or quotation but the fact that a figure of grief or ecstasy formed in antiquity can lie dormant for centuries and reappear, still charged, in a body that knows nothing about it. Images survive their occasion. They travel, they wait, and they return altered.

The exhibition takes this as a working condition rather than a subject. Nothing here is lifted intact and offered for recognition, which is what separates the show from appropriation. Each artist acts instead as a carrier, a place where an inherited image or gesture or syntax re-enters circulation in a form its source would not recognise.

Prinz Gholam anchor the argument. Their drawings are made by two people at once, four hands on one sheet, without a plan. What surfaces comes from memory rather than reference: a rabbit, a posture held years ago in front of a painting, fragments of an art history carried in the body instead of looked up. Their longer practice of taking the poses of historical pictures with their own bodies is Warburg's Pathosformel in its plainest form, the gesture outliving the painting that held it, and the drawings are what remains of that survival once the pose is no longer being performed.

Hélène Delprat is the show's iconologist, and the term is Warburg's own inheritance. Four decades of painting, drawing, film, theatre and installation have produced a constellation drawn from literature, radio, philosophy, national histories, canonical art history and internet databases, sources so many and so unlike each other that none can be retrieved from the finished work. Her inventory is assembled by affinity rather than category, which is the logic of the Mnemosyne Atlas, and it arrives at Warburg's conclusion by another route: the past is something built, and the present will not hold still.

Alma Feldhandler's paintings are fed by century-old photographs, from archives of diaspora to Victorian London and the history of fashion, yet no photograph is visible in them. Applied in thin layers of bright colour, her wounded creatures and anxious forms are reached through pigment rather than transcribed from a document. What waits in her corridors of time are not portraits of the people in those archives but survivals, figures that made the crossing and lost their occasion on the way.

Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo's neon reads My Silence is your comfort. Behind it stands Audre Lorde's warning that silence offers no protection. D'Angelo does not cite the line, she turns it over. Lorde addressed the silenced. This sentence addresses whoever is served by the silence and names their comfort as its function. The original is not preserved, it is answered, and it is more dangerous in the answer.

Jonas Weichsel inherits nothing as nameable as an image. What comes down to him is a syntax, the grammar of geometric abstraction, a language he did not invent and cannot own, which he subjects to procedures until it yields what that grammar was never built to yield. At a distance the paintings hold an impossible precision. Close up they become sensation. The show needs one position where the inherited thing has no subject matter at all, to test whether survival belongs to images or to forms.

Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju works where the archive is least innocent, with records made by people who never expected to be answered. Warburg's afterlife is usually narrated as European images returning to Europe. Ilupeju's practice insists that images also survive as evidence and as injury, and that bringing something back can be an interruption rather than a homage. Her work keeps the exhibition from treating survival as a neutral process.

What is inherited is not chosen.