A significant retrospective look at the diorama-driven career of Marcel Dzama offers some of the thrills of the wax museum along with more enduring grist for thought. Dzama’s one-time signature installation Even the Ghost of the Past updates Etant Donnes in ways that both expand and circle back on the Duchampian original. While Duchamp’s work still appears eternally pregnant, the addition of new figures seems to both personalize the scene and fix it more clearly at a specific moment in time — less “origin of the world,” more the content of a certain dream. Still, provocative and poignant.

(At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal through April 25.)