Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction, and Bani Abidi possesses the uncanny knack of driving this dictum home more vividly than almost anyone else. Her sources are news reports and human-interest stories to which she lends a twist, spotting the absurdity in these situations and weaving fictional narratives around them. Her single-channel video An Unforeseen Situation, 2015, for instance, is based on a series of mass events organized by the Punjab Ministry of Sports in 2014, in which multiple world records were ostensibly broken by Pakistanis. Abidi focuses on the patriotic fervor displayed

This exhibition’s title, the triad “ALT-MOA-BIT,” sounded like onomatopoeia or an abstract battle call but was actually derived from the name of the street on which Gregor Podnar recently opened a new gallery space in Berlin’s Mitte district. In this regard, the title of Anne Neukamp’s third solo show with the gallery performed a kind of consecration of the new location. The first hyphen mirrored the normal spelling of the street name, Alt-Moabit; the second was her addition. The graphic tripartition she thus implemented lent the name a forceful rhythm.

In defamiliarizing an element found in