Angus Fairhurst takes an unusual approach to collage: iconoclasm and censorship. “Body and text removed” is the refrain in the titles of these works, which were constructed out of magazine ads and billboards—and with a sharp pair of scissors. Instead of simply leaving blank spaces behind the removed bodies and words, Fairhurst superimposes more cutout pages to produce complex layers of advertisements whose messages and messengers have gone missing.

These collages demand detective work and voyeurism; they combine the efforts of a puzzle, where the image is known but must be reconstructed, with

In the late ’30s, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova spent countless days and nights in front of a prison’s gates in Leningrad, waiting in the freezing cold to see if her son Lev Gumilyov was even alive. Another woman there asked: Could one ever describe this? I can, replied Akhmatova, and she soon began writing “Requiem,” one of the most shattering testimonials in world literature. Marcel Odenbach, noticing in Rwandans introverted behavior uncharacteristic of Africans, began to wonder whether this was perhaps a consequence of the 1994 genocide. Later, working in the film archives at the United Nations,