‘Perilous Bodies’

Through May 11. Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, Manhattan; 212-573-5000, fordfoundation.org.

Some credit for the almost unbearable intensity of “Perilous Bodies,” the group show that inaugurates the Ford Foundation’s new gallery for art concerned with social justice, goes to its 19 artists from around the world. Confronting ills from sexual violence in India to resource extraction in Africa, most of them succeed in getting to the heart of very difficult material. (The gallery was part of an overall renovation, and most of the work in the show is unrelated to the foundation’s contemporary art collection .) But most of the credit is due to the show’s curators, Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, who wove their work together.

Because balancing artistry against anguish is so challenging, and because such a balance is even more sensitive to its context than art usually is , no single piece can be sure of landing cleanly on its own. Mohamad Hafez’s delicate dioramas of half-destroyed Syrian buildings might register merely as beautiful, and Tiffany Chung’s backlit photos of similar rubble, taken alone, are tonally ambiguous . Tenzin Tsetan Choklay’s movie “Bringing Tibet Home,” which follows his friend and fellow exile, the artist Tenzing Rigdol , as he smuggles a truckload of Tibetan soil through Nepal to Dharamsala, India, is undeniably melancholy, but it’s also as absorbing as “Indiana Jones.”

Viewed all together, though, under a spray of 418 cast-foam miniature Hellfire missiles — the Pakistani-American artist Mahwish Chishty’s memorial to the civilian casualties of American drone strikes — they’re as shocking as getting hit by a truck. Stagger into the next room to see Teresa Serrano’s extremely disturbing short video “La Piñata,” in which a man alternately gropes a small female mannequin and beats it to pieces; the Australian artist Hannah Brontë’s equally unsettling all-female rap video about climate catastrophe; and Dread Scott’s 1999 installation of six shooting targets, one for each of six black men killed by the police in the 1990s, over a wooden coffin (“The Blue Wall of Violence”). Then go into the Ford Foundation’s tranquil, tree-filled atrium and sit quietly for a while. WILL HEINRICH