Kutlug Ataman: Kuba New Oxford Street Sorting Office, London WC1, until 7 MayBeck's Futures ICA, London SW1, until 15 May  It is evening in the abandoned warehouse and voices echo in the gloom. Their murmurings throng high up above you. Climb the dank staircases, cross many concrete floors and you will eventually come upon their source: 40 battered tellies talking incessantly in front of 40 battered chairs. Take a seat and become part of this community of strangers glowing in a wasteland of dusk.  These are the residents of Küba, a shanty town hidden somewhere among the high-rises on the edge of Istanbul. The first settlers, in the Sixties, were hard-left Kurds looking for a place to hide, followed by all sorts of other outsiders. United by a proud defiance of the state, the army and, in particular, the police, their enclave, according to Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, who has spent more than two years filming their monologues, is 'first and foremost a state of mind'. Maybe it's named after Castro's island republic, but as one resident winkingly claims, the name came from seeing Little Havana on television in Miami Vice.  A pioneer, dedicated to building a utopia of corrugated tin, tells of conmen trying to sell non-existent deeds to the land - 'But we're still here, 40 years on, waiting to be evicted.' Young men boast of ingenious schemes to dodge the police squads who comb the alleys. A real old Mother Courage of a protester - 'Call me for the big action; I don't turn up for the minor stuff' - proudly describes 15 days of torture for putting up an anti-government wreath. A mother recounts her son's violent death. A father makes a living as a gambler to get his son an education: 'Somebody's going to make it out of Küba!'  To describe their stories as compelling would be mere understatement. You move between the monitors, catch a story halfway through and can't tear yourself away until the beginning loops around again. A sense of Küba begins to emerge: arrests, beatings, the tyranny of General Evren, games between the shacks, resourcefulness, lifelong loyalties - '100 people here would give their lives for one person.' And always there is the vital lesson of relativity: one wife weeps because her husband has no car to drive their sick child to hospital day after day; another because her husband beats her for screaming last time he beat her.  Ataman never edits, never editorialises. To watch these films in their entirety would take several days. People wander off-camera, chew nuts, smoke joints, nurse their babies. They spin tall tales, talk familiarly of people you don't know (at least to begin with) and their speech often proceeds by non sequitur. Hardly anybody acknowledges the lens and you're put directly on the spot, one to one with the Kübans in their homes.  Wherever you sit, you are aware of the pressure of community around you; whatever you hear is inflected by what you've already heard, and dependent on the time and order in which you happened to hear it. Thus, no two visitors are likely to have the same experience. Küba, both the place and Ataman's installation, is thus irreducible and cannot be summarised.  Which is, I think, what makes this such an exceptional work for the artist. In the past, his big principle - reality is always individually edited - has been seriously inconvenienced by his methods. Monologues would be so wilfully badly dubbed, filmed and fragmented on multiple screens that you could hardly stay for the hearing. But here, he has filmed people talking very powerfully about their lives in a way that couldn't be delivered in a novel, a film or any other kind of art form. It is as fully complex as that community deserves and by far Ataman's best work yet.  Beck's Futures, Britain's biggest art award, is only six years old, but already feels strangely depleted. This is clear enough from the show of shortlisted artists, tellingly down from 10 to six this year. But, amazingly, it even seems to be acknowledged in the catalogue.  What went wrong? Beck's started out as a defiant alternative to the Turner and deserved its early popularity with the public and, so one heard, within the art world itself. It has exemplary rules. There is no age limit. None of the artists has to have had a show in the past 12 months. It is not decided by a powerful jury bestowing further preferment on a small group of established artists whose shows they just happen to have seen in the last year, or even organised in their own museums, as is often the case with the Turner.  Instead, the Beck's judges, this year including the artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Cerith Wyn Evans, make their selection from a vast list of candidates put forward by hundreds of nominators, including artists, writers, freelance curators and, of course, the public: a field wide open and free.  As for the show itself, it started out so well. The first year included Roddy Buchanan, David Shrigley and Chad McCail. The second was closely fought between DJ Simpson and Tim Stoner. Since then, much of the art has been aggressive, empty, wilfully plagiaristic or cack-handed. This year, it is just steadily unexceptional. It feels like nothing so much, in fact, as a perfectly pleasant degree show.  Take Daria Martin's film of a magician and his assistant manipulating cards - one-handed shuffling, plucking aces out of thin air and so forth. Occasionally, they tumble in pretty, coloured patterns: patterns that are supposed to remind you of Mondrian and Malevich. How are the mighty fallen.  Lali Chetwynd has some tiny paintings of bats, faux-Romantic and quaintly pretty, plus a collection of awkward cardboard constructions that includes a gigantic carnival mouth. These are props. But since it's unlikely you'll see the performance in which they feature - there are only two outings during Beck's Futures - they mainly sit uselessly on the floor.  Ryan Gander's comical-philosophical lecture might be striking (from architecture to Captain Birds Eye via loose association) but all that's left of it is the shrunken relic of a photocopied text. Christina Mackie's installation-cum-sculpture (tantalisingly titled My Depression) is the most meaningless assemblage I've seen in years.  Donald Urquhart's graveyard installation - wreaths, epigraphs, wall drawings - is half-heartedly camp. Even the perfume he created for the occasion seems too weak to linger in the air. The only contender here is surely Luke Fowler, who's showing two films - one the spoof biopic of a pop musician which amiably parodies all sorts of documentary styles; the other about RD Laing's anti-psychiatry movement and the famous Kingsley Hall experiment. This makes a point of appearing as unauthored and unedited as the experiment itself and can hardly help but fascinate, edging as it does towards disaster.  But the show feels pallid: scarcely anything to make you linger. And perhaps a clue comes in the judges' rueful discussion in the catalogue. Has the talent pool simply diminished, they wonder, or is it something else? Could it be that the same artists are being nominated year after year and now refuse to re-submit their work, having seen what increasingly poor art gets shortlisted for this prize?
Art: Kutlug Ataman's latest installation is a complex triumph, but the artists shortlisted for the Beck's Futures award are woefully uninspiring, says Laura Cumming.