The show — organized by Linda Komaroff, curator of Islamic Art — doesn’t say this directly. In fact, it says nothing directly at all. The galleries are all but bare of explanatory labels. (There are a few informational touch screens halfway through.) Ordinarily, I’d find this lack of history or commentary disturbing, perverse. But here silence works because so much of the art — and particularly the new art, by Pouya Afshar, Shoja Azari, Ramin Haerizadeh, Malekeh Nayiny, Yasmin Sinai, Newsha Tavakolian — is so strong. You may not understand details of specific narratives, but you clearly see that there are narratives, old and new, and that they’re related, that they’re about the drama of power clashes and the violent emotions they can stir.

Only the visual language changes. The most extensively depicted historical figure here is Shah Naser al-Din (1831-1896), largely because he introduced photography to Iran and sat for the camera a lot. He ruled for nearly 50 years, did some modernizing, but pandered to Europe, ignored corruption in his own regime and was finally assassinated. Official images of him on view reveal little of any of this. Most show a stiff, reserved, inexpressive, sword-bearing figurehead, a version, only slightly updated, of an antique icon of imperial might.

But we see quite a different Naser al-Din in a 2009 series of digital prints by the Iranian artist Siamak Filizadeh. Using actors and elaborate sets, Mr. Filizadeh presents the story of the ruler’s life as a phantasmagoria of kink and corruption, and the Shah himself as a shameless, let-it all-hang-out clown. The images are beyond sendup. They’re a pointedly flipped version of old power. The ruler’s a failure, — but he’s also a winner because now he’s a big personality, a folk hero, a star! The images, old and new, say it all.

Chances are good that I’m not going to encounter as offbeat an exercise in art-as-history in any other museum anywhere soon. Maybe they’re only likely to happen with any regularity in a place where art institutions and their conventions are still in a healthy state of flux. I’m glad I caught the show here.