In 2015, KOW’s programming will be dedicated to seven filmmakers. It is hardly a secret that the medium of film has come to play a central role on the contemporary art stage; over the past decades, it has been instrumental to opening up new perspectives, methods, and subjects for the visual arts. By interweaving documentation and a probing imagination, discourse and suggestion, reality check and dream factory, the moving image has become indispensable to art as a whole.

Many artists have adopted filmmaking as one practice fully on a par with others. In some instances it complements other techniques—see Tobias Zielony’s work in film as well as photography—while in others it is framed by sculptures and installations, as in the work of Hito Steyerl and Clemens von Wedemeyer, or subject to reflection in more intimate formats, as in Barbara Hammer’s drawings and collages. In the oeuvres of Chto Delat?, Renzo Martens, and Mario Pfeifer, it figures as one component of a larger conceptual or performative project. What we will present in 2015 is not a film program: we want to highlight these entanglements of the medium and draw attention to the methodological diversity that filmmakers bring to contemporary art. Hito Steyerl, Renzo Martens and Chto Delat? will have their first monographic exhibition in a German gallery.