For his exhibition “Les choses que vous faites m’entourent” (The Things You Do Surround Me), Massinissa Selmani presented drawings from four series created over the past three years. A sense of suspension and disorientation hovers over these works. Clearly, the artist has learned the Surrealists’ lessons about the hidden subversive power in the most ordinary things, and about art’s potential to break open even the toughest outer skin of reality. One strategy, which Selmani uses in the “Promesses” (Promises) series, 2017, is juxtaposition, in which the artist combines two everyday scenes in order

Displayed at the top of the stairs leading down to the gallery’s main exhibition space for Hassan Sharif’s “Reading Is Making: Books and Boxes” were copies of three political cartoons that the artist drew in the 1970s. The images speak of the tide of consumerism that began sweeping Sharif’s native United Arab Emirates in the ’60s. In one, a hand reaches up from under a pile of electronic appliances. I'M DROWNING, DROWNING, DROWNING!!! his speech bubble calls out in Arabic. In another, a mustachioed man is pictured on the toilet, surrounded by a discarded mess of books, wearing a Rube Goldberg–type