Something has happened to all the dust jackets and book covers in Jaro Varga’s library. They have been fully or partially replaced by slogans and exclamations documented on public walls, facades, and toilet stalls. Like any larger library of its generation, this collection tracks the typical zigzag of the Eastern European intellectual since the 1990s, gravitating from a burning interest in poststructuralism toward radical political theory and all the disappointments it can hold.

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In his installation In Somebody Else’s Library, Varga superimposes his archive of street graffiti onto the volumes, turning them into marginalia. The space is a lived-in study but no longer a safe retreat. The raw voices of the street bleed through the high-theory texts, proving that any withdrawal from politics was always an illusion. In this scriptorium, the margins have overrun the page.