Boston Museum of Fine Arts features Greek exhibition

The underlying message of the show — and the reason it can be frustratingly evasive and intangible — is universal: Everybody’s got a different version of what happened.

Curators Eirene Efstathiou and Evita Tsokanta kick the exhibition off with a powerful evocation of this tension. “Ducktator,” a video by Loukia Alavanou, splices propaganda films and Disney animations from the 1930s and 1940s with contemporary images of her Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother, who speaks like a news-show talking head, although we can’t hear her.

The audio — along with the clickety-clack of a film projector moving the images — includes 1970s Greek news broadcasts.

These are juicy juxtapositions. Who speaks the truth here? Is Alavanou’s grandmother any less sincere than the newscaster? Is an individual’s oral history less real than the packaged news?

There’s something Cubist about this exhibition, a sense of the world fracturing and coming back together in odd ways, from different perspectives. Eftihis Patsourakis effectively conveys the dissonance in his “Equivalence of Casualties” series, in which he strings together snapshots from the 1970s and 1980s, linking them along their horizon lines.

They’re often nostalgic lost scenes of middle-class life, but the connections can be jarring. A man with a parachute descends over a beach full of sunbathers in one photo; in the next, soldiers debark from a small barge.