In their evocative new show, Unrest, the impish Essop twins hint that the only thing worth fighting for is ungoverned thought, writes Ashraf Jamal. "It is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art: He must make me feel it for myself. He must get at my emotions through my eyes." These words, written by English art critic Clive Bell in 1913, are often forgotten by critics and art marketers who insist on explaining away art with clever words.A hundred years later, the problem persists. Enter Ossian Ward, head of content at the Lisson Gallery in London. Ward's job, like Bell's, is to help us to feel through our eyes. But it's different now: ours is an image-glutted world. In Ways of Looking, Ward writes: "Much of our culture, infused as it is with the same multisensory slap-in-the-face shorthand as our hurried existences, can be difficult to look at or get a grip on. Even making simple eye contact with today's art can be tough."story_article_left1This problem compels us to stay still awhile, cease our distracted lives, and somehow find some meaning in the encounter with art. This could set us free from our deluded grip-hold on so-called reality. By sticking with the importance of the personal, holding onto some fleeting and nostalgic authenticity, we might be able to pry free a self crippled by identity politics and the big socioeconomic and political pictures that dwarf and blind us.Quaint as it might seem, art can be good for us. And while we may never quite wrest ourselves from the chattering classes and the insidious consensus they foster, there remains a chance that we, as individuals, can find our own way in the world.This hope helps when looking at the work of Hasan and Husain Essop, the twins who've been causing such a fuss with their travelling show, Unrest. On the surface they seem like agit-propagandists: such is the seemingly literal or reactive nature of their work. Using a rotating tripod and digital stitching technology, the Essops re-present themselves as multiples. Given that the brothers look nearly identical, the further cloning results in a disorienting experience. Unable to focus the eye - the twins love a frenzied moving figure more than a static one - the viewer is reminded that stillness, and a poised perspective, might not be the best approach to the work.Perhaps it's better to look askance, drop the gaze, change angle. The Essops revel in angles.But however often we look again, the subjects stay the same. It's as if we can't escape them: like infinitely duplicating superheroes, they keep holding our gaze. What could this effect mean? Are the twins projecting some obsessive-compulsive paranoia, as dramatised in Homeland, in which threat, perceived as Islamic fundamentalism, is everywhere? Are these images a visual play on Edward Said's orientalism - of the fear of difference in a world racked by conflict between Judeo-Christianity and Islam?block_quotes_start It's as though by replicating themselves, refracting their essence, the twins are forcing us to rethink the very tendency to objectify others, thereby reducing someone to something. block_quotes_endMaybe, but something else is afoot: a wryly comic, ironic, or absurdist reflection inward. It's as though by replicating themselves, refracting their essence, the twins are forcing us to rethink the very tendency to objectify others, thereby reducing someone to something. This tendency is of course the morbid font for xenophobic attacks.The Essops are deadly serious in their auto-critique of stereotypes, as well as extremely playful in the ways they set it up. So what we experience is a certain weightlessness; a loosening of the tension.story_article_right2It is one thing to say that an Essop is about "forced displacement" or the "unfulfilled promise of freedom manifested in informal settlements like Mandela Park" and quite another to simply look at the artwork and experience the emotion it generates. Yes, the photos are psycho-geographic responses to specific locations; District Six, Athlone, Sea Point. What matters more, though, is the peculiarity of their take on a given location or history, because the Essops are first and foremost performers of prevailing assumptions and prejudices. Their conversion of a public gym on the Sea Point promenade into a Jihadist training ground is as uproariously funny as it is unsettling.Hence the title of their award-winning show: Unrest. Of course their works are designed to agitate. Harking back to the Dadaists and the Situationists, and the multiple selves of Cindy Sherman, the Essop twins' digitally stitched images are also designed to provoke a reaction and force a reflection.They speak the unspeakable; drawing upon prejudice and fear to shift the unrest away from the diminished representation of others back towards a self which, in these jingoistic times, has become increasingly ungovernable.We need to rediscover what matters to us in our drastically hurried existences. Perhaps the Essop twins can help us do that.Unrest is on at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until June 20 2015...