Goshka Macuga’s category-confounding strategies of playing artist-as-curator, unearthing an institution’s history, and displaying otherwise concealed information reflect her upbringing in Communist Poland— a politics of exposure, she’s said, directs her research-based practice. In 2011, Macuga installed Family—a remake of a censored Oscar Bony sculpture—in the spot in Warsaw’s Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art where Maurizio Cattelan once exhibited his meteorite-struck pope. For The Nature of the Beast, 2009, Macuga set up a meeting space for political discussions in London’s Whitechapel Gallery and furnished it with a tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica that was not only shown at Whitechapel seventy years earlier but had been draped behind Colin Powell when he declared war on Iraq at the UN in 2003. Both projects, alongside a dozen others from the past ten years, are reprised in Macuga’s first museum survey and further unpacked in a catalogue with essays by Dieter Roelstraete, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Adam Szymczyk, and Grant Watson.

— Martin Herbert