A man sits on a chair holding a rock, staring out at the world. Above him a cloud-filled meniscus; all around him grey, empty nothingness. He dusts himself off, and then, agonisingly slowly, begins to drag a huge slab of rock towards the foreground. For this is Sisyphus, in Greek mythology the king of Corinth punished for his trickery by being banished to Tartarus. Condemned to roll a boulder up a hill every day, his fate was to endlessly watch it roll back again. And so on for all eternity.

In Dimitris Papaioannou’s striking visual take on the story, Sisyphus’ labours are intensified. Amplified sounds of rock against rock set our teeth on edge as the edifice crumbles bit by bit. The slab becomes an assault course, the prisoner literally burrowing into the surface while another figure morphs out of it, the top half of one cleverly complementing the bottom half of the other like two pieces of a human jigsaw. Mirror images writhe and contort on the surface before the edifice falls, leaving a pair of feet comically poking out from underneath. The condemned man remains defiant, for he is after all a worker with a worker’s pride in...