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ALL may at first seem much as it was last year at Jupiter Artland, now reopened for the summer season in this lovely corner of West Lothian. And yet there have been changes over the winter. The cafe, somewhat diminutive (unlike its selection of cakes), has been extended to double capacity and the interior given a complete overhaul by the Swiss artist Nicolas Party in the first permanent installation of the year.

Party’s work has recently been seen in Scotland at the Modern Institute in Glasgow in 2016 and Edinburgh’s Inverleith Gallery (currently closed in the form we knew) in 2015, his brilliantly-hued arboriscapes with their lollipop trees and pop-eyed portraits reworking the idea of still life, landscape and portraiture.

Aptly (and possibly alarmingly, if you are the more reclusive sort) renamed Cafe Party, the interior is a wrap-around wall painting on a bright pink ground, a skewed reworking of the densely wooded Jupiter surroundings in dense greens and azure blues. Party’s key tropes – trees, fruit, portraits – are all here in glorious colour.

Party’s striking and absorbing overhaul is complete, having designed everything from the plates to the tables, working with artisans to create a faux malachite effect for the table tops over which he has oil-painted surrealist faces in fruit. The paintings are topped with glass, enclosed. The effect is highly dramatic, entirely enveloping, slightly claustophobic – this is Party world – rather like a reimagined turn-of-the-century cafe in continental Europe, with painted wall tableaux. Party’s staring portrait eyes are always on you.

Berlin-based Michael Sailstorfer, who once created a gold rush on the beaches of Folkestone, presents “Brenner”, an installation which is anticipated, smelt and sensed before one has even entered the doors of the Steadings gallery. John Heffernan, head of exhibitions, tells me that when the stoves inside are lit, the three newly-installed tall chimneys puff out smoke like smoke signals. It reminds him, he says, of the smoking chimney of the Sistine Chapel when they are choosing a new Pope.

Nothing holy inside though, although there is something in this stark space that harks back to a more Dickensian time when industry was the new religion. Three car frames, painted matt black, line up on a “production line”, their skeletal and entirely stationary bodies “run” not by an engine but a wood-burning furnace, of which each has one attached to the vast chimneys outside. The inferences are many, not least the idea of the use of resources, the belching of fumes, the factory-like nature of our ever-more industrialised world.

The metamorphic quality of this space, and of the vision of the gallery directors, is striking. Last year we moved from an open space filled with guitars and zebra finches (Celeste Boursier-Mougenot), to a split space with a puppet show and a heartbeat recording studio (Christian Boltanski), to this year’s insular, enclosed production line. Each time, the space is unrecognisable, renewed.

Sailstorfer, an artist of ideas and questions, also has a rather wonderful popcorn machine installed in the Ballroom gallery (1:43-47, Salzburg), a miniature production line of corn kernels, popped on a belt and left to pile up on the floor, seemingly perpetually. The skids of children – and adults – wading through the stuff like snow are already legion. In a few weeks the popcorn will be up to one’s knees and more, Heffernan tells me. The Ballroom Gallery will fill up like a saucepan full of popping corn. When is enough?

In the new dovecot space (incidentally a very old space), Sailstorfer’s film Traenen (not running the day I visited due to a power cut) will show a house being demolished by giant teardrop wrecking balls thundering down from above. Above, the doves, unseen, carry on their business.

American artist Liz Magic Laser brings her analgesic installation, Primal Speech, to the Tin Roof Gallery. A psychotherapy room with padded walls, the gallery is filled with stuffed toys in neutral grey representing the main political parties, the Democratic Donkey and the Republican Elephant in an encouragement to visitors to take their frustrations out on the relevant effigy. On the wall, a video will run of a workshop the artist ran with participants of various political affiliations in an attempt to bring them all together. Opposite, a Chinese round-bellied vessel apparently made for shouting one’s frustrations into, is encased, perhaps frustratingly for anyone minded to try it, in glass, an echo of therapy-past.

The whole is based on 1970s psychotherapeutic notions of primal therapy, the cathartic re-experiencing of a traumatic event. Designed specifically to bring those with differing political viewpoints together, in this instance, Liz Magic Laser will also hold two political therapy workshops in June and August, run by drama therapist and actress Louise Platt. And if the padded room doesn’t help you, at least you can take a stress-relieving walk in the woods afterwards – or gorge on more sugar-based stress-relievers in the dense woodland at Cafe Party.