On a humid December afternoon, I encountered a group of schoolchildren taking turns wearing a virtual-reality headset. Each of them slowly and distinctly moved their hands in space, attempting to touch what they saw. The phantasmic experience evoked amused laughter from the group of visitors to Shezad Dawood’s exhibition “House in a Garden,” in which VR became a loaded metaphor through which to examine ideas of sovereignty, soft diplomacy, and the politics of space. In his VR piece Encroachments, 2019, references gleaned from his time as a boy in Pakistan—arcade parlors in Karachi and anti-Soviet