When the Museum of Modern Art opens its Adrian Piper retrospective this week, visitors walking through a passageway in the exhibition will be required to hum in the presence of a museum guard.

“The Humming Room” evokes the idea of “silly authority,” as Ms. Piper has put it. That work and her prize-winning installation “The Probable Trust Registry,” which prompts viewers to sign declarations like “I will always mean what I say” on bureaucratic-looking paperwork, “probably arise from my jaded attitude toward institutional authority,”...