The appearance of public art is often the result of top-down decision-making or capital-driven urban regeneration. In “COHAB: An Assembly of Spare Parts,” Can Altay reviewed the genre, examining its reception at street level by the people who live with it and, in turn, addressing what he evocatively called the “agency” of artworks that persist in our environment.

As his object of study, Altay took Utrecht, a city famous (or notorious) in Holland for its more than four hundred public artworks. His exhibition was structured around “assembly points”—wooden units echoing the architecture of