Chohreh Feyzdjou was an outsider (or felt like one) all her life. She was the child of secular Jewish parents in Tehran — her family name, changed by her father, was Cohen — and educated in Muslim schools. She converted to Islam to marry, was soon divorced and dived headlong into Sufism, then kabbalah. In 1975, she moved to Paris, where she concentrated on painting until she encountered the archive-based installation art of Christian Boltanski. She spent the last few years of her life — she died of a hereditary blood disease — recycling her work in room-filling ensembles of empty stretchers, packing crates and rolled-up paintings, all covered with black-brown walnut stain.

One such installation has been reconstructed at the Grey. You can see Mr. Boltanski’s influence in the insistent gloom, which would look blankly generic were it not for Ms. Feyzdjou’s personal touches: drawings in notebooks, identifying labels attached to objects like baggage tags and a purple neon sign reading “Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou.” The sign feels like a joke about art and consumerism; this artist once filled a Paris storefront with funky stained things and called it a boutique. But there’s no mistaking the emotional weight of this tomblike self-archive and of the time-haunted politics of experience that it reflects.

Interestingly, the art made by the show’s younger artists, Ms. Ahamadi and Mr. Pouyan, while far more political in a literal sense, is much lighter and less personal in tone. Unlike Ms. Feyzdjou, who played down ethnic particulars in her art, both artists spin variations on a specifically Persian style of miniature painting. With references to the royal epic the “Shahnama,” or “Book of Kings,” Ms. Ahmadi depicts blood-oozing court rituals presided over by faceless rulers and bomb-wielding apes. Mr. Pouyan makes digital copies of historical miniatures and edits out the figures, altering history through elimination.

As a genre, miniature painting, common to Asian cultures, has been adopted by so many artists as a vehicle for political commentary that it’s lost the snap of novelty, even become a cliché. Ms. Ahmadi’s riffs on it grow more effective the further they expand in scale, as in the mural-size “Safe Haven” from 2012. And Mr. Pouyan is at his best in another medium, sculpture. His “Projectiles” series of suspended steel forms suggest both antique weapons and drones poised to launch.

I admire these things. They’re formally ingenious and conceptually tight, and like Mr. Tanavoli’s “Heech,” satisfyingly graspable even at a glance. But I tend to respond more fully to a different kind of art, less finished, more elusive, more lived. Ms. Feyzdjou’s work is an example of it. So is that of Barbad Golshiri.