Utopias—imaginary, historical, political, emotional—are often mentioned in the conversations that swirl around Mai-Thu Perret’s multifarious oeuvre, yet there is a subtle dystopian fever to her project. Take the Geneva-based artist’s more than decadelong work The Crystal Frontier, 1998–, a body of writings describing a fictive women’s commune in the New Mexico desert, where the authoritarian strictures of patriarchal urban capitalism have been shrugged off like so many old robes. The satirical potential of the subject, focused as it is on a decidedly outdated feminist model of society,