All too often, the curators of group shows are guilty of shoe­horn­ing artists together, beginning with a premise, then finding work that proves it. Here, curator Lynne Cook of the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York has done the opposite, cor­ral­ling three artists - Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie and Francesca Woodman - whose work prac­t­ic­ally begs to be shown together.

All three use the camera, whether to make pho­to­graphs, film or video; all three train their lenses on them­selves in their immediate environs. And in so doing, all three raise questions about gender and the female body in art, make inquiries into issues of identity, and use their chosen media to slip the usual moorings of time. Seeing them together, there are so many shared concerns, so many echoes, such a sense of dialogue between their re­spect­ive practices that it is hard to believe that Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman were operating in isolation, largely unaware of each other's work.

Ellipsis opens with Woodman, who died young and re­l­at­ively obscure, aged 22, a suicide. It seems fair to say that her pos­thu­m­ous re­pu­ta­tion - at least among the young artists on whom she continues to exert an influence - is in part thanks to the poisonous Romantic notion that a great talent lost is all the greater, but in the room at the DCA devoted to her small black-and-white prints the weight of that re­pu­ta­tion is lifted from the shoulders of her work. We see her in her studio, or in the grubby rooms of abandoned houses, re­lent­lessly in­vest­ig­at­ing the pos­s­ib­il­it­ies of self-por­trait­ure. Mirrors and glass are ever­y­where. Woodman hides herself, uselessly, behind clear panes, huddles behind mirrors or crouches like a museum exhibit inside a vitrine. This tendency to reflect, deflect and direct the viewer's gaze is at its most powerful in a work where, unusually, Woodman appears only by proxy: three women, naked, stare into the lens, their faces obscured by a print of Woodman's own face.

Elsewhere, the focus is on the female body in its sur­roun­d­ings, with Woodman de­lib­er­ately making herself invisible, concealed behind drapes of peeling wallpaper. There is a lot of blurring, too, not just to produce artefacts of long exposure, but to introduce the passage of time into the still pho­to­graphs.

Time and movement are central to the work of Lili Dujourie. Fourteen of her video works, made between 1972 and 1981 - co­in­cid­ent­ally or not, the same span as Woodman's working life - are ranged across a bank of monitors on the gallery floor. The first five of these, all bearing the title Homage à (one of many ellipses in this show) leave the viewer to fill in the possible subject of Dujourie's tributes. That subject is any artist - male, it is safe to assume - who has ever painted a nude: Dujourie films herself on a bed, or on the floor beside it, shifting from familiar reclining poses to awkward ar­range­ments of limbs, a device that high­lights the ar­ti­fi­ci­al positions in re­p­res­ent­a­tions of women's bodies. Perhaps thanks to the sometimes violent movements or obvious dis­com­fort of some poses, these pieces call to mind more unsavoury examples of such re­p­res­ent­a­tion - Walter Sickert's Camden Town nudes, say, or John Deakin's ex­ploit­at­ive pho­to­graph­ic studies of Henrietta Moraes for Francis Bacon. In other videos, Dujourie again adopts cliched poses, here a sultry vamp, there a listless housewife. While time is in­ev­it­ably present in the moving image, Dujourie, in a way that recalls the motion blur in Woodman's work, injects a sense of pro­gres­sion into her works, only to subvert it. Oostende, a series of images shot from the artist's studio, are shown as slides, each one with a projector of its own. The mode of display will have viewers waiting with baited breath for the usually imminent shift on to the next image, but it never comes - an ellipsis with no res­ol­u­tion.

More ellipses follow in the films of Chantal Akerman. Je tu il elle, an in­stal­l­a­tion reworking of a feature-length film, offers a de­con­struc­ted narrative on three screens. The first shows the heroine played, in­ev­it­ably, by Akerman engaged in odd rituals, eating sugar from a bag, rest­lessly re­ar­ran­ging sheets of paper on the floor and, in an echo of Dujourie, shifting between poses on a mattress. The second sees a woman who may or may not be the same character chatting in a bar with a man, waiting with him in an idling truck, and watching him shave. The third is an extended, if not explicit, sex scene in which Akerman's character, or someone who looks the same, fumbles with a girl­fri­end. It's an exercise in mystery, ob­fus­c­a­tion and omission, with Akerman setting up possible in­ter­pret­a­tions and leaving them hanging: are we being shown a split narrative, the ima­gin­ings of the first woman, or something else entirely? Akerman's new edit of the 1971 film Mirror provides, finally, some res­ol­u­tion, re­flect­ing and combining devices just seen in Woodman's pho­to­graphs and Dujourie's Homage series: a young woman stands before a looking glass and dis­pas­sion­ately appraises her own body, feature by feature.

This is a powerful show that explores - if you'll excuse the term - the first flowering of feminist video art. It is worth noting that these women share more than a common set of concerns in that, while they provided primary texts for feminist critical theory, and their work can only be seen today through the lens of that discourse, none of them made their work ex­pli­citly within that context. While the body, questions of identity and the mediated gaze of the camera are to the fore, Ellipsis is also a show about time. This is not the sort of ex­hib­i­tion you can flit through, pausing for a little while before works that catch your eye. Instead, the shifting of time in the works on show - Dujourie's frozen slides, the long static shots in Akerman's films, Woodman's stilled movements - imposes a sort of active torpor on the viewer, slowing time to the pace of a too-hot afternoon. This effect is, at least in part, down to sensitive curation by Cook, who has done much more than simply bring Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman together, and has, moreover, arranged their work in such a way as to expose new, un­ex­pec­ted con­nec­tions between the three artists.

Ellipsis is at DCA, Dundee until June 22nd, 2008.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 9th, 2008.