Praneet Soi’s Juggernaut (Galerie 88, finishing today) is a meditation on the relationship between art and terror. Terror, in its contemporary forms, appals and compels, but also numbs, the eye. 9/11, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has made terror both spectacular and banal, producing its own standards of the sublime and the clichéd. And until long after the Abu Ghraib photographs were released into the public domain, they remained the most-looked-at images on the internet. In all this, the role of art is ethical and political, as well as perverse. Art forces us to look at, and reflect on, what we’d rather not look at. But it also knows about the strange pleasure we take in “regarding the pain of others”.

Soi’s sparsely arranged combination of paintings and sculptures is aware of this ambivalence. His recurring motif is taken from a press photograph that is now part of the image-repertoire of global terror: a woman, called Davinia, coming out of the chaos near London’s Edgware Road station after the 7/7 blasts, clutching a surgical burns mask to her face. In Soi’s work, she mingles with Afghans and Abu Ghraib torture victims in the acrylic miniatures of the Disasters of War series; she towers on canvas, in the darkness of night, over cars and against modern architecture (picture); she turns into a large, fiery-red fibreglass bust. She is Soi’s Angelus Novus, alluding at once to the Paul Klee owned by Walter Benjamin and to Benjamin’s interpretation of the male figure in Klee’s painting as the Angel of History “who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at”.

What Benjamin’s angel sees, however, is not “the appearance of a chain of events”, but “one single catastrophe”. But the angel’s ubiquity in Soi’s work breaks up this singleness of vision, refusing to confine her to a unique defining moment in history, be it the Holocaust or 9/11. Terror is given multiple historical and aesthetic frames, its scale and substance varying constantly from the gigantic to the diminutive. Soi’s little victims, survivors and aggressors are set against monumental versions of themselves and their weapons. This playfulness with scale lends to human brutality the bedtime ghoulishness of children’s stories and games.

The references to Goya’s Disasters of War etchings of Napoleonic atrocities in Spain, to Caravaggio’s David holding Goliath’s severed head, and the giant white model of Ahmad Shah Abdali’s Zam-Zammah canon (on which Kipling makes Kim sit, “drumming his heels” against the metal) add up to a layered history of brutality and domination, both in themselves and in the way they engage the visual imagination. This allusiveness, though minimally deployed, speaks very well for itself. It does not need the anxiously interpretative hand-out that has been prepared for viewers.