What makes Anna Daučíková’s work so fascinating is its severe, even acerbic lucidity on the one hand, and its poetic refinement tinged with eroticism on the other. Both qualities were on display in the new piece that Daučíková, the recipient of the 2018 Schering Stiftung Art Award, created for the exhibition of her work at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Titled Expedition for Four Hands and Accompaniment, 2019, it consisted of several sheets of engraved glass, a publication commemorating the late Greek human-rights activist and drag queen Zak Kostopoulos, and a three-channel projection.

To manifest real disquiet in a gallery is not easy, but Heike Kabisch’s “frothing, you and I” got close. The main room in Berlin gallery ChertLüdde’s modest Kreuzberg space, half-lit by murky pink strip lights above a wall-size image of guileless rhododendrons, grew darker in every sense as you looked down. On the floor were blackened ceramic sculptures of desperately scrawny legs poking out from various kinds of covering, numbered as a series of “poses,” 2019–, and collectively titled I told you to be more passionate . . . (all works 2019). Left of the door, a coital scene was unfolding, heads

While some things deteriorate with time’s passing, others resist its effects. Or so the title “Rust & Bones” seemed to remind us. But this tight gathering of works by Ulf Aminde, Nilbar Güreş, Laurel Nakadate, and Justin Liam O’Brien was more oblique than that. It was an exhibition about relationality and confrontation that asked viewers to privilege efforts at reconciliation and togetherness over the conflict and isolation that often seem their inevitable outcome.

In Nakadate’s short video Exorcism in January, 2009, the artist, a young woman, visits an older man in his messy, gray apartment.