Mr. Fast’s video, moving back and forth in time, departs from this account of Sander’s life by suggesting he eventually had a political awakening, though it came too late. We see him as a young photographer viewing the world through the camera’s lens and from under a black camera cloth. Simultaneously, we meet him old, blind, and haunted by the past, specifically by the apparitional figure of a Nazi officer whom Sander photographs even as he learns that this was the man who had let his son die. The question hangs in the air: Can art ever be morally neutral? The film becomes a meditation on the responsibility of the artist to engage in politics, whatever the risks, or die of regret.

The second video, “Looking Pretty for God (After G.W.),” from 2008, has a lighter mood, and a different message. Set in funeral parlors, it’s an unnervingly upbeat look at the work of professional funeral directors, the artists who give an appearance of life to the dead. We’re never quite sure, from one scene to the next, whether we’re at an embalming session or a fashion shoot, and the placement of video adds to the slipperiness. Whereas “August” is projected in a standard black-box space apart from the fake waiting-room installation, “Looking Pretty for God” is inside it and even has Chinese-language subtitles.

In ways successful and not, this show is about trying to make things threatened with extinction look alive: a neighborhood under attack; the mid-tier gallery as an engaged and viable enterprise: and the market-squashed ideal of art as a moral force.