The nature of a site is in the details: the way that this concrete floor maps a shape from white wall to white wall, or the way that the broad walls give way to narrower ones and another mounted with a bookshelf, or the way that the large, ground-floor window looks out onto a particular vista. Banalities like this year’s extralong, snowy winter in Berlin also count among the specifics of a site and might even have come to mind at Marlie Mul’s exhibition “Boneless Banquet for One,” where the mixture of gravel and slush tracked around by pedestrians on the city’s streets and sidewalks seemed

All day long and half the night, Andrei Monastyrski and his dog wander through the city. It’s cold in Moscow, the ground covered with snow. To make his photo series “Self-Portraits,” 2012, the charismatic cofounder (with Nikita Alekseev, Georgi Kizevalter, and Nikolai Panitkov) of the Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviya) group inserted his own image into random urban settings, posing as stiffly as Pinocchio. In Self-Portrait 2001, he’s flipped up the visor of his fur cap and stares into the camera with wide-open eyes. Generically the gesture signifies fear, horror, or surprise, but