Miyako Ishiuchi (b. 1947) has long used photography as a medium for expressing Japan’s memory and mourning. This was particularly evident in her “Mother’s” series (2000-05), exhibited in the Japanese Pavilion of the 2005 Venice Biennale: a group of photographs of personal articles, from lipstick to lingerie, once belonging to the artist’s late mother, whose life of wartime hardship and postwar motherhood resembled a 1940s melodrama. The point was driven home more recently in “Hiroshima/Yokosuka,” a partial retrospective of Ishiuchi’s work held at the Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo.

Xu Zhen’s recent solo show raised issues of human exploitation that have surfaced occasionally in the contemporary art world since at least 1972, when Gino De Dominicis included a young man with Down Syndrome in his installation at the Venice Biennale.

Greed may be out of fashion these days, but it remains very much on the mind of Francesco Vezzoli. Demure and self-effacing, Vezzoli claims to live out of a suitcase in Milan, and would seem to be far removed from the fashionable subjects that preoccupy him.

In the context of the abysmal global economy, the latest solo show of Claire Fontaine is disturbingly relevant. Titled “Feux de détresse,” or “Warning Lights” (like those on an automobile), it was conceived as an interrogation of the politics of labor, and an exploration of the world of work as a metaphoric prison for the human mind and body.

Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has a long history of creating controversial works that explore issues of capitalism and exploitation in various historical and social contexts. His art often combines installation and performance, and is usually documented by photography and video. Past projects include coating Iraqi immigrants in polyurethane foam and letting it harden, paying drug-addicted prostitutes from Brazil with drugs to get tattoos of lines across their backs, installing a gas chamber in a German synagogue and setting a gallery in Mexico City on fire on its inaugural night.