Rosalind NashashibiChisenhale Gallery, London E3, until 27 May  David MaljkovicWhitechapel Art Gallery, London E1, until 6 May  Rosalind Nashashibi won the Beck's Futures Award in 2003. She was the first woman to win the prize. I saw the four videos that thrilled the judges and even wrote about them in this paper, but to this day, and despite seeing other work by her since, I remember almost nothing about them.  Not unusual, you may say, and video, of all art forms, surely deserves a mollifying pardon. For how can it hope to be always memorable? Spooling along in the soporific fug of the darkened museum, repeating itself in mandatory loops, avoiding narrative, climax, too much characterisation or plot, it works hard to be something other than cinema. And it has been a dominant way of working for so long now, 30 years and more, that most of its special effects - its special aesthetics - are tried and familiar. If you are a gallery-goer, your expectations of video by now, I guess, may be many and complex but they aren't likely to involve being struck to the marrow.  There is, though, a very prevalent strain of video that actually aims to be forgotten, or perhaps half-forgotten - to set forth images that will slip into the mind and vanish, like a cormorant, only to reappear much further down the river. Seeing the premiere of Nashashibi's new film at the Chisenhale Gallery, before its showing at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, raised spectral memories of her earlier works. A woman slowly sorting through jumble-sale clothes to the soundtrack of an Egyptian lament; mothers making a vast dinner in a little room in Nazareth, a tiny window shedding light on the scene; an electric twilight picking out idlers on the streets of small-town Nebraska. These images returned to mind in a beautifully involuntary way, like sudden memories of far-flung places.  The connectedness of all lives and places is among Nashashibi's main subjects as an artist and is probably why four short videos rather than one long one may be a better way to see her work. But Bachelor Machines, her 30-minute feature is, none the less, a good place to start. It is better structured, better paced and more sophisticated than anything she has made so far and balances very subtly between moving and static images. The opening sequence - a diagonal bowsprit beneath a pale moon (or perhaps a fading sun, for there are gilded clouds) - has the appearance of a still until the bowsprit suddenly dips and you realise we're all at sea on a vessel.  Cabined, cribbed, confined: this is a film about the tight press of men on a cargo ship from Italy to Sweden via Portugal. The sailors come from all these countries, it seems, and a strict hierarchy of position and nationality appears to be in operation. Food-making, door-fixing, rope-throwing, waiting - these are the lowly tasks of those who smoke Marlboro Reds and have nothing but beer compared with the bottled water and wine in the captain's mess behind closed doors.  Nashashibi's camera is oblique, over-the-shoulder, entirely unnoticed except by one flirtatious Italian. It stares closely at the strangest details: the scar on a sailor's poker-playing hand, the arrangement of locks on a cupboard that somehow resembles a face, the way these circular locks echo the portholes and the ladles and the design of the officers' epaulettes as if they were all part of some nautical family. And then her camera looks out through these portholes, noticing what the sailors do not see: the haunting seas and shores of the world beyond.  For this is an in-turned life, the sailors plunged deep in their floating institution. The ocean shots are tranquil, silent; the interiors have a constant soundtrack of tense conversation. None of the conversation is translated (this is not a movie) and it wouldn't seem any less strange, one feels, if it were. Nashashibi's sequences are beautifully structured - dark figures bent over machines, backlit by sea-shine; radars pulsing green light; long corridors that you round to discover nobody there. The film is eventless, in a sense, bar a shot of smashed crockery and the life-raft suddenly quivering in midair, but its editing amounts to a nail-biting enigma. There isn't a cliched image in the whole film and it manages to be a new thing of its own - patterned, dreamy and as intensively composed, in its way, as a painting.  To remain on the verge without collapsing into boredom: that is one trick for videos that want to get under your skin without seeming to do so. And that is surely what Croatian artist David Maljkovic was trying to achieve with his trilogy set in the country's Second World War memorial park built under communist Yugoslavia.  Three young Croatians drive there in a foil-covered (futuristic?) car in 2045, searching for 'a future heritage'. Twenty years later, a boy approaches on foot through deep snow as if on some spiritual pilgrimage. The third video, of teenagers milling aimlessly around the central tower, completes the tedium and makes the whole thing seem finally meaningless. In fact, there is only one artwork of any interest in this hapless trilogy and that is the silver sci-fi tower: gleaming, undulating, deservedly forgotten, snow drifting through its shattered windows.
Art: Rosalind Nashashibi's beautiful new video is a real treasure, leaving David Maljkovic all washed up, says Laura Cumming.