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.

While pursuing an artistic career in Paris, Carolle Bénitah rediscovered family albums from her Moroccan childhood and began to reinterpret the images they contained. She selected, scanned, and made new prints of the original photographs, then embroidered patterns into them with bright red thread. The source photograph for Le déguisement was taken on the Jewish holiday Purim, when costumes are often worn. Bénitah echoed this tradition by stitching veils over each child’s face and allowing loose ends to pool at the bottom of the frame.

In this two-part piece, Barbara Probst embraces multiple perspectives of a single moment. Each image is integrated into the narrative of the other while simultaneously unraveling it. In one photograph, the protagonist appears to be running from the camera, perhaps playfully; the aerial image of her on a rooftop, however, suggests more ominous surveillance. Probst reveals her process by regularly including her camera and tripod in her work, their presence either confirming the truth of the image or breaking it down.

Sigrid Viir produced this diptych for a solo exhibition in which she performed the act of creating a body of work. Twelve pairs of photographs represented the duration of the exhibition, with accent colors (pink, in the case of Day 1) corresponding to paint she applied to a sculptural object and pedestal in the gallery each day. Folding and manipulating her own self-portrait, Viir comments on the artist’s compulsion to replicate a style or self in relation to art world demands.