The title of Cyrill Lachauer’s exhibition “What Do You Want Here” is a phrase the German artist heard often as he traveled through neglected, sometimes impoverished regions of the American West and along the Mississippi River. There, he made films and photographs that he calls “narrative landscapes,” inhabited by the cultural and historical references that initially preoccupied him as a student of ethnology—a discipline he ultimately abandoned in favor of the radical subjectivity of making art.

His film Dodging Raindrops—A Separate Reality, 2016–17, retraces the steps of Carlos Castaneda

One enters KOW on its upper floor, emerging onto a landing that during “Hotel Résistance,” Ahmet Öğüt’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, offered an initial and striking glimpse of a bronze statue, just over three feet high, of a man looking down at something invisible pulling at his pant leg. Placed on a plinth that rose sixteen feet from the gallery space below, the sculpture was both close and out of reach, familiar yet vague, like some strived-for ideal—setting a tone that resonated throughout Öğüt’s perceptive and thought-provoking show.

Looking at the figure while descending the