Not long after Anton Chekhov framed the narrative principle now known as “Chekhov’s gun”—if there’s a rifle on the wall, it must fire eventually—Andrei Bely unleashed Petersburg, a 1916 novel about turn-of-the-century terrorism, whose parricidal plot unfolds to the ticking of a bomb ignominiously concealed in a sardine tin. The question never is, will the device explode, but who will it destroy when it does?

Karan Shrestha’s solo exhibition “apparatus at play” was steeped in a similar tension, a jitteriness that resists commitment to any one particular form. Much as Bely draws the comparison