In An elliptical retort... (2009), a handwritten letter on various hotel stationeries, Marc Camille Chaimowicz conveys his impressions of contemporary Los Angeles as he prepares for his solo exhibition at the Vienna Secession. Chaimowicz, who lived in Vienna in 1982 on an artist residency, experiences Vienna reappearing again now, "in myriad form or as a chimera," from his remote location in Tinsel Town.

Paul Pfeiffer’s masterful sound-and-video installation The Saints premiered to considerable acclaim in 2007 in an empty warehouse next to London’s new Wembley Stadium. Based on the famous 1966 World Cup Final match between England and Germany, the piece now has an impressive reincarnation at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. Those flush and confident days in the art world of 2007 seem far away now, but Pfeiffer’s work is well suited to our much-questioning and more precarious era.

A longtime fixture on the Istanbul contemporary art scene, Erdagˇ Aksel, 56, is an influential teacher as well as an artist known for provocative sculptures, installations and performances that frequently allude to Turkish history, and most often encompass a scathing critique of militarism. Among the 15 recent sculptures in this show, titled “Remembering/Forget! and Forgetting/Remember!,” were several wall reliefs made of bunches of long, yellow, folding wood rulers.

Thea Djordjadze is Georgian, and the letters that follow “Explain Away” in the title of her exhibition at Sprüth Magers are the equivalent—in the Georgian alphabet—of the abbreviation i.e., made open-ended by lacking an object. Along with the conventional sense of “explain away” as discounting or minimizing, to explain is to narrow down to a particular interpretation, and away suggests freedom and flight.

In her disquieting canvases and drawings, Iris Levasseur embraces the human form as both medium and message. “What’s irresistible,” she confessed in a recent interview, “is giving birth to bodies, having at your disposal the bodies you dream of.” In “Tauromachy,” her recent exhibition of six large-format oils (2008 and ’09) and five graphite works on paper (all 2009), she took the bullfight, with its mix of spectacle and slaughter, as an allegory for human relations. Straddling the permeable divide between sexual pleasure and physical brutality, these dreamscapes might be mistaken for nightmares.