In the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany, one of the linesmen—an Azerbaijani who became known as a Russian in popular folklore—awarded England a controversial point when the ball crossed the goal line but bounced back into play. Mark Wallinger uses this moment as his curatorial starting point for “The Russian Linesman,” a project that folds works over one another, collapsing real and psychological borders with concertina-like precision.

Near the entrance to the show, Wallinger contrasts footage of Philippe Petit’s tightrope strung between the unfinished Twin Towers in 1974 with Joseph Beuys’s Cosmos und Damian Gebohnert (Cosmos and Damian Polished), 1975—a lithograph of the landmark buildings, which Beuys renamed after a pair of martyred Christian healers. Nearby is Thomas Demand’s Poll, 2001, a reconstruction of Palm Beach County’s Emergency Operations Center, which kept America suspended between two very different futures after the 2000 presidential election. From these disparate images Wallinger constructs an overlapping narrative about the fragile lines between the imagined and the real, truth and lies, politics and religion, and past and present, all intensified by the lingering memory of September 11.

Elsewhere, he groups works by George Stubbs, Eadweard Muybridge, and Bruce Nauman with his own “Doctor Who” police box to explore boundaries between time, space, and movement. Not far away, the floor of Monika Sosnowska’s Corridor, 2006/2009, after several yards suddenly turns ninety degrees upward. Viewers return to the main gallery disoriented, denied the rest of their journey by gravity’s pesky limits. However, Wallinger quickly brings them back to the real-world themes of the exhibition, guiding them across many other borders and demonstrating the same intelligence throughout. Curators have much to learn from his sensitivity, craft, and depth of thought; “The Russian Linesman” is an outstanding exhibition, a work of art in itself.

— Anthony Byrt