“My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality,” says Sarah Pickering. In her series Explosion, Pickering shows the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. On closer inspection, we see that these are small-scale simulated explosions, of the type used in military and police training exercises and special effects.

While living in London, Elisa Sighicelli made a number of lightbox works inspired by the Renaissance art on display at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena. Looking past the paintings’ dense content, Sighicelli examined the background scenery and extracted passages of charming natural detail and painterly freedom; here we see a horizontal slice of the lower portion of Benvenuto di Giovanni’s Ascension. She then mounted the photographic print on translucent acrylic, the reverse side of which she selectively painted black, so the fluorescent light illuminates only the sky.

Staged deep in a forest in eastern Poland, this photograph depicts a member of a fictional utopian cult in the process of “devolving” into a tree—rejecting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of plant life. In the series Modern Life of the Soul, Melanie Bonajo and Kinga Kiełczyńska capture nature’s beauty and mystery at the same time as they satirize our tendency to romanticize it, particularly in relation to gender and nationalism.

Aida Silvestri’s poetic approach to documentary photography allows her to explore diaspora, culture, mental health, and politics in her work. In this series, she embroiders portraits of Eritrean refugees with colored thread that maps the perilous journeys they took toward safety and personal freedom. The black-and-white images recall passport photographs, yet Silvestri uses blurred focus to maintain her subjects’ anonymity and enlarges the prints to elevate the refugees’ newfound exile identities.

Iris Hutegger has described her stitched photographs as “real images of fiction.” While hiking in the mountainous region of Switzerland where she lives, Hutegger takes color photographs that she prints in black and white. She then assigns the images numbers, removing their geographical specificity, and uses her sewing machine to insert foliage that could never appear in reality. The emotional dimension of the stitching is twofold: it adds imagined color and life and shifts our sense of scale from a vast mountainous expanse to a minutely patterned surface.

Having grown up in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, Eva Kot’átková creates collages, performances, and site-specific installations that explore the individual’s relationship to social structures and institutions such as hospitals and schools. These three vignettes depict confrontations between silhouetted figures, some of whom wield devices inspired by the artist’s research in the archives of local institutions, like the Psychiatric Hospital Bohnice outside of her native Prague.

The work is part of Natalie Czech’s Poems by Repetition series, in which the artist recreates poems by well-known twentieth-century authors by highlighting or hiding prose on printed ephemera and consumer goods—from iPads and magazine articles to album covers and overdrive pedals.

Yto Barrada made Papiers Pliés by collecting the recycled paper wrappings used by vendors of snack foods—chickpeas, peanuts, sunflower seeds—in Perdicaris Park in Tangier, Morocco, then folding the detritus into geometric forms and photographing it. The printed French words taille (size) and expédition (shipment) indicate the sheets’ original function as forms from a textile factory and allude to Morocco’s past as a French colony (1912–56).

Ulla Jokisalo uses found photographs—from popular magazines, vintage family albums, and other sources—as the points of departure for her carefully handcrafted assemblages. She then sews, manipulates, and otherwise fashions dimensional compositions that unite her personal memories and associations with a surreal world of fairy tale figures and gender-redefined creatures. The title of this work is a reference to T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem “The Waste Land” (1922), in which a large cast of narrators continually upends our sense of reality.