Asad Raza is a situationist. Not the Debord or Vaneigem type: he’s more liable to make you laugh. Case in point: He once rerouted a river so that it ran through a Frankfurt gallery. (Thirsty visitors could drink its filtered water.) He turned a sixteenth-century Milanese church into a tennis court. Mucking around with space, getting us to think about who—or what—goes where: the world feels softer, deeper, still worth believing in after you leave a Raza show.

Poor rats: they usually provoke disgust and screams. In Thigmotaxis (the rat show), he asks us to put aside repulsion. Using concrete and wood, he’s designed small sculptural toys for the rodents to explore, touch, and play with. On a wall is a piece that’s corrugated and striated, and that (should the mood take us) we can rub up against too.

Another room has video footage of the mini sculptures near New York’s stoops, garbage areas, court houses. It’s pixelated, mostly color-leached, voyeuristic. Echoes of John Carpenter movies, of Francis Alÿs’ The Nightwatch (2004), in which we get to view night-cam surveillance of a fox set loose in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Here the rats resemble thieves casing the joint, hanging around like post-club ravers, making sudden moves like parkour runners. They’re in the company of flies, spiders, birds. They’re sensualists who learn through touch. Though we may never love them, we would do well to learn from them. —Sukhdev Sandhu

Cowboys, The Kinks, Chinese factories, the street names of old Paris, the reservoirs of New York, yesterday’s tomorrows: Lucy Sante, the writer and cultural historian, gleans the past, squints and pores over it, bends it into new shapes. Printed matter is sacred to her. Handbills and flyers, pulp fictions and penny dreadfuls, mass-market ephemera.

Those same compulsions are present in Knots, an exhibition devoted to Sante’s collages. She’s been making them for nearly six decades and, more lately, sharing some on social media. Now they’re on display in the basement library of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a tony setting—here a globe, there a grand piano—that accentuates their off-kilter charm and quiet perversities.

Haussmann, or the Barricades (1979), which at less than letter size is one of the larger pieces, has a suggestive chunklet of text referencing “dream elements.” Most of the collages draw from early- and mid-twentieth-century sources—ads, games, medical textbooks. Some individuals look as if they’ve just stumbled back from WWI trenches—or the pages of a Surrealist journal. Colors pop. Words are used concisely—“Double Bubble,” the Ed-Ruscha-esque “OOF.” What’s not here? The savage satire of John Heartfield, punk’s ripped-and-torn aesthetics. Instead, whether on those collages framed on the Academy’s walls or presented as postcards on its bookshelf ledges, there are artful, tactile memories—of youthful yearning, the scent of big cities, magical modernism. —Sukhdev Sandhu