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The artist Nathalie Djurberg (Born 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden) and musician/composer Hans Berg (Born 1978 in Rättvik, Sweden) collaboratively develop projects that span the cinematic, the sculptural, and the performative to explore the deepest human emotions—desire, compassion, fear, love, pain, regret, and grief. The collaborators’ immersive sensorial environments are a mélange of claymation projections and sculptures by Djurberg and electronic soundscapes by Berg. As in dark folktales, visitors enter fictive worlds populated by human and animal archetypes whose sexual discovery, aggression, vulnerability, and pain expose the fragile and harsh realities of the world. Djurberg’s characters ignore and defy unwritten laws of social conduct with consequences that are simultaneously absurd, humorous, and horrific.

Bang your little drums begins by presenting phrases like “stomp your little feet, snap your little finger” written in Day-Glo colors against a black background. The accompanying musical track seems to take a cue from the text; as the phrases describing banal actions repeat, it rises to orchestral heights. There is no unified narrative, but threads that seem to ravel and unravel: a chained brown bear scoops ice cream, a man unpeels a giant banana, a young boy emerges from a cocoon. The vignettes suggest a transformation and transfiguration of characters that hinges on the grotesque and humorous.

Tacita Dean’s (Born 1965 in Canterbury, England) explorations of the relationship between analogue media and the vicissitudes of time, history, and our natural world have made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Film, photography, and drawing form the foundation of her practice, and in each instance the chosen medium amplifies her themes. At its heart, Dean’s work is grounded in the material, temporal, and associative qualities of 16mm film. In poetic works that luxuriate in slowness, concentration, and the soft colors and tones of film stock, she approaches iconic architecture, portraits of artists for whom time and movement are critical components of their work (Merce Cunningham, for instance), and the manufacture of film stock itself. Interspersed with these occasionally monumental pieces are lyrical series of photographs, drawings, and prints that mine the historical presentation of place and history.

Dean’s The Russian Ending is a series of prints that depict the aftermath of an unspecified disaster. Explosions, shipwrecks, funerals, despoiled landscapes, and ambiguous events are annotated by the artist, suggesting possible scenarios. The series takes its title and theme from a tradition in early twentieth-century film production in Denmark (then a major generator of films) in which alternate endings for films bound for U.S. or Russian markets were offered. While the U.S. received films with happy endings, Russia received films that ended in disaster—one conclusion for the land of Disney and an entirely different one for the land of Dostoyevsky. In Dean’s series, the effects of industry, mechanized labor, and war play are rendered in deep, atmospheric tones, underscoring their ambiguity and suggesting history’s inherent subjectivity. The wry title both conjures the last century’s forking path of shared experience for the U.S. and Russia, and announces the end of the Soviet Union.

Alexandre da Cunha (Born 1969 in Rio de Janeiro) uses utilitarian objects to mimic and embellish the gestures of historical abstraction. Mops pose on pedestals to impersonate Constantin Brancusi’s columns, baking trays dangle from curtain hooks in imitation of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, and toilet plungers masquerade as precious vases that slyly wink at Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. The concept of the “assisted readymade” Duchamp pioneered in 1913 is the foundation for da Cunha’s playful elevation of prosaic products. As a student, da Cunha was influenced by the modernist architecture of Rio de Janeiro and was educated in the sensuous geometries of Neo-concretism in São Paulo. Although he emigrated to London to pursue graduate work at the Royal College of Art and the Chelsea College of Art, and has lived there ever since, he embraces Brazilian aesthetic strategies of recycling, reuse, and improvisation.

Of the many household items he repurposes—beach towels, skateboards, deck chairs, hockey sticks, canvas awnings, flowerpots, and straw hats—da Cunha works most extensively with mop heads. Bust XXXV is part of his first body of work based on the mop, the series Busts, 2008–12. In these works, long strands of dyed wool are knotted to the ends of upside-down mops, the handles of which are planted in concrete plinths. Da Cunha’s title for the series signals the figurative presence of the mops and links them to a classical genre of sculpture. Mops symbolize cleaning, a process that da Cunha considers meditative and reinvigorating, though their deployment also alludes critically to the labor conditions of domestic and janitorial workers worldwide.

Multimedia artist and performer Nick Cave (Born 1959 in Fulton, MO) began exploring the intersection of fine art, craft, performance, and material culture in the early 1990s. He first gained widespread recognition in the art world for his Soundsuits—full-body costumes crafted from twigs, buttons, ceramic figurines, toys, and other objects he gathers from antique shops and flea markets. Cave first devised the Soundsuit as a protective “second skin” in 1991 in response to the racial profiling and beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. In later works he expanded his artistic expression to include paintings and sculptures that adapt the material and formal applications invented for the Soundsuits.

Although he often displays Soundsuits as sculpture, Cave and others also wear them as sound-generating costumes for live performances, photographs, and videos. At the top of this appliquéd outfit is an elaborate chandelier structure containing dozens of ceramic birds and strings of plastic beads. The work epitomizes Cave’s lavish, baroque aesthetic, a mirror of our culture’s excess and a radical reinvention of contemporary sculpture and craft.

Sophie Calle (Born 1953 in Paris) began making work that explores the sphere of human relationships in the 1970s. Most closely associated with conceptual art, Calle employs provocative methods and a wide range of media, including books, photography, video, film, and performance, to investigate subjects such as identity and intimacy. She is well known for her voyeuristic and detective-like projects, which have featured others’, and, several times, her own, life in its emotional and psychological dimensions. In her documentation and presentation of these performances, she often uses text and photography in ways that redefine notions of truth, fiction, and narrative.

The Doctor’s Daughter is a photograph from Calle’s larger project by of the same title that tells the story of a doctor’s daughter, a little girl named Sophie, who grows up to become a striptease artist. The black-and-white photograph print depicts a woman (presumably the character Sophie, who is played by Calle) lying on the floor on a bed of rumpled clothes and strewn belongings. Below the photograph is a text written in the first person recounting the subject’s work as a striptease artist, including a dramatic and violent encounter with a fellow stripper “on January 8, 1981” that led to her leaving the profession. The text functions as a caption, endowing the sexually charged and seedy scene with a degree of authenticity. Together, text and image construct the fictive protagonist who elides with the artist’s own biography.

Known for her singular body of small-scale paintings on paper, Massachusetts-based Laylah Ali (Born 1968 in Buffalo, NY) often positions her subjects in odd poses, engaging with one another in curious ways. Her longest-running and best-known series depicts brown-skinned, gender-neutral human beings she calls Greenheads.

While reminiscent of the Greenheads, the figures in Untitled display new levels of detail and pattern. The scene is ambiguous and confounding. Framed by Ali’s signature sky-blue background, two figures lie at the bottom of the image, leaning against each other. As is characteristic of her oeuvre, the scene is one of implied violence; though we do not see the act itself, we witness its brutal aftermath. Yet, rendered in Ali’s cartoonlike style, the scene is simultaneously infused with absurdist humor. The figures, in matching striped pants, have no arms. Their flesh-colored heads suggest a helmet, hat, or bandage … or maybe have they been scalped? The mid-section of the figure on the left is covered with cuts or scars. A long, thin leg that rises from the stomach of the right-hand figure resembles an SOS flag.

In her distinctive gouaches, Laylah Ali (Born 1968 in Buffalo, NY) depicts abstracted human figures who assume odd poses as they interact with one another. Many of them are brown-skinned, androgynous creatures she calls Greenheads. The Greenheads, with their bug eyes, simplified bodies, and pointy black boots, are recalled in the figures in Untitled.

As in all of Ali’s work, the cartoon style initially charms and disarms, but then discloses a world fraught with tension and mystery. The drawing shows a somber child being scolded by someone (perhaps his mother?). They both have strange headpieces—the boy’s is yellow with five small feet sticking out of it, and the woman’s is reddish, hairy, and horned. What do these symbolize—their tribes? A superpower? A disease? The piece has a looser technique than most of Ali’s paintings, which are customarily painstakingly composed and executed. While it is a bit less serious in tone, it retains her characteristic open-endedness. Ali allows viewers to interpret and complete her ambiguous scenes, as if they were comic-book pages with empty captions.

Conceptually driven, Andrew Witkin’s (Born 1977 in Boston) artistic approach is both inspired by and nearly indistinguishable from his deliberate approach to life, work, and relationships. Witkin explains that his work “is and is not art, is and is not finished.” Though his projects have taken a wide range of formats, from large installations to more discrete objects, they all show his interest in repetition and open-endedness.

Untitled consists of 144 white T-shirts hung on hangers. The scene is a familiar one: a sea of mass-produced shirts, as you might see in a clothing store. Written in black on each shirt are short texts—quotes from authors and artists, a single word, or a terse phrase. They range from provocative (“something must happen”), ho-hum (“photos of friends”), and melancholic (“seeing a homeless man every day for weeks on beacon hill and then from one time on, he is gone”) to jovial (“hahahahahahaahahahahahahahah”). As viewers walk through the installation, their upper bodies are obscured by the hanging T-shirts and only their legs are visible, as if their individuality were masked by the shirts. The listing of collaborators, who include colleagues, friends, family, artists, and various cultural figures, is integral to Witkin’s work and further blurs the distinction between his artistic practice and his everyday life.

Rachel Perry’s drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work celebrates the often-overlooked beauty and humor of everyday life. Living as a very young child with her family and two chanting monks in a temple in Kyoto impressed on the artist the wonder of paying close attention to all aspects of the quotidian. She says, “I will continue to thoroughly—some might say obsessively—examine all aspects of my life and try to make sense of them.” Traces of the everyday, the physical, the ephemeral, and the virtual are the building blocks of Perry’s work, which involves the artful accumulation of receipts, family medical records, produce stickers, grocery packaging, voice message recordings, and other materials that are usually discarded.

Karaoke Wrong Number evidences Perry’s highly inventive use of virtual material that most would delete without a second thought. She saved a series of messages left in error on her telephone answering machine, compelled by the urgency and expectation she detected in the recordings. Filming herself in the video in a frontal head-and-shoulders view, Perry lip-synchs the messages, with expert timing and facial expressions, maintaining a deadpan expression between messages. The video work revels in the simultaneous connections and disconnections of contemporary life, where technology both assists and impedes communication. The voicemail messages concern matters both businesslike and intimate, from tax filings to an attempt to repair an estranged relationship. The apparent trust these individuals have that their entreaties will reach the right ears is both heartbreaking and familiar.

When exhibited as part of the ICA/Boston’s 2006 Foster Prize exhibition, the work captured the imagination of visitors, and in the collection it joins other important video work by Kader Attia and Christian Jankowski.

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Using the potency of advertising media, Kelley Walker (Born 1969 in Columbus, Georgia) appropriates iconic cultural images and digitally alters them to highlight underlying issues of politics and consumerism. He often employs a “copy, cut, and reprint” technique via inkjet printing and screenprinting. As the artist has stated: “I am thinking of printed matter as raw material with traces of history. The logo has an aura of propaganda that interests me.”

In Lee Radziwill Interview March 1975, one of Walker’s so-called brick paintings, the text and images are taken from an old issue of Interview magazine in which pop artist Andy Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes interviewed Lee Radziwill (an American socialite and younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). After printing various pages from the March 1975 issue of the magazine onto canvas, Walker added images of white bricks, disrupting, distancing, and obscuring the original source. The fragmented magazine content becomes the “mortar” that is laced throughout the composition, becoming a subtle anchor of meaning.