Remains of the Day

Hrair Sarkissian traced the flight path of a migratory bird and found it looked exactly like a noose. He constructed a small model of the building where he spent most of his life in Damascus, then, over seven hours, bashed it to bits with a sledgehammer, pausing after every strike to take a picture. Maha Maamoun used literary fiction, cinematic history, and a cache of YouTube videos documenting the nighttime break-ins at state security buildings in Cairo (and elsewhere in Egypt) to convey the weird inner fantasies let loose by periods of political unrest. She made works based on the stories of a man haunted by visions and a drug dealer who turned into an animal hybrid of zebra and goat. Samar Al Summary scoured Beirut for signs of survival and resistance at a time of imminent economic collapse. In that blighted city, heaving with protest, she captured not a single suffering body but the deep layers and delicate textures of material poverty, an ethos of improvisation hovering just above ruin.

A decade has passed since the start of the so-called Arab Spring, when a movement for radical change erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, rolled across North Africa and the Middle East, and spilled down