“Accumulation becomes important, stacking one thing on the other,” Hassan Sharif said in 2015, a year before he died. “It’s like time—the idea that history stacks itself one event on another.” In line with this belief, Sharif repurposed—you could say, re-stacked—colorful materials to create conceptual sculptures and installations. Sharif grew up in the United Arab Emirates in the 1960s, when the discovery of the oil reserve prompted huge change. His stories are about the shifting dynamics of consumerism, economies, and modernization. —E.C.