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So differently do Shahryar Nashats carefully controlled set pieces and and Ryan Trecartins explosive montages approach the senses that one might wonder why their films and videos have been screened together. Essentially, though, both explore the politics of power—that exercised by the state and by the individual. And, hinged upon human dilemmas, this seven-film program works well: Nashat’s three films constituting the repetitive salad course to Trecartin’s indigestible junk-food fest. In the former’s The Regulating Line (2005), a track-suited man walks into the Rubens room at the Louvre, takes off his shoes, socks, and top, and slowly executes a one-handed handstand. A conversely homoerotic human portrait (given the number of naked ladies on view), the Swiss artist’s specific contextualization of a complex physical action taps into anxieties about the institutional experience: how, and for whom, the museum is set up for use.

Meanwhile, it would take a combination of serious gaming, Web surfing, TV watching, and clubbing habits to disinter Trecartin’s many pop-cultural references. The Texan-born artist and his crew act out a bizarre, often disturbingly funny range of scenarios on the notion of love in the postdigital age: not for nothing do the PR materials mention both the films of John Waters and the work of the anarchic multimedia collective Paper Rad. The work’s visually fragmented nature means that one video can blur into another; this isn’t a bad thing, for the presiding feel—of being trapped between the smarting layers of the zeitgeist onion—counts for more than any single theme. And, as in Nashat’s work, so here: whether we’re engrossed in the screen or looking for the door, our responses feel consistently and consummately directed.