For photographer, author, and filmmaker Moyra Davey, autobiography is a form of intertextuality. In some of the most insightful videos made in the last decade, abundant literary references map personal inquiries into collective memory and history. Dressed plainly and donning a headset, the artist paces around her apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, reciting notes on a range of writers and thinkers. As her thin frame catches the golden light streaming through her windows, we absorb the radiance of Davey’s sentimental education.

Exposure and illumination are, of course, the

Seeing Adam Pendleton’s exhibition “These Things We’ve Done Together” so soon after trying to digest “Who Is Queen?,” his overwhelming, densely information-laden show that filled the five-story-high Marron Family Atrium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, came as something of a relief. “The [MoMA] exhibition presents itself as an accumulation of labor,” said Pendleton of the presentation—and the viewer’s labor, if not the artist’s, could seem Sisyphean. But the piece certainly succeeded in “successfully fus[ing] a building and a situation,” to quote a phrase from Pendleton’s 2008 Black Dada