This summer’s Documenta 12 (16 June – 23 September) brings together work by over 150 artists encompassing all forms of contemporary art practice including a broad component of moving image work.

Held every five years in the German city of Kassel, Documenta is regarded as one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art, and has historically exerted a unique influence over the western art world. This year’s exhibition is held over six sites, taking in the city’s 18th Century Museum Fridericianum and the specially constructed greenhouse-like Aue Pavilion, as well as the Gloria Kino cinema which hosts a diverse film programme.

Curated by husband and wife team Roger M Buergel and Ruth Noack, Documenta 12 is characterised by a palpable emphasis towards less well known artists and includes a broad crop of relatively unknown artists from Eastern Europe, India, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Buergel and Noack’s selections sustain Documenta’s reputation for serious, politically and socially engaged work with artists throughout the exhibition drawing on photography and film to reflect on international issues of migration and conflict.

Documenta 12’s extensive moving image component represents a broad selection of approaches and forms, through both gallery based works on show across the exhibition sites as well the nightly cinema based film programme. A number of large scale moving image works were commissioned for the exhibition, most notably James Coleman’s lavish film installation Retake with Evidence, which features actor Harvey Keitel delivering a heartfelt soliloquy as he wanders though a series of apocalyptic sets.

Elsewhere in the Neue Galerie, Summer Camp (2007) by Israeli artist Yael Bartana documents the efforts of a group of middle aged volunteers as they rebuild a house demolished by Israeli authorities. The 12 minute video shows the team’s communal efforts as they pass bricks and buckets of cement, accompanied by a stirring soundtrack borrowed from Zionist propaganda films of the 30’s and 40’s. Since the development has no building permit it is unlikely to remain standing for long before being again demolished by the Jerusalem municipality, who do not grant permits to Palestinians. In light of this fact the constructive act of building becomes an act of dissent against an aggressive regime.

Johanna Billing’s semi-documentary, This is How We Walk on the Moon (2007), depicts a group of musicians from Edinburgh as they nervously attempt to navigate a sailing boat on the North Sea. Created in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery, the film features a soundtrack based on a song by experimental musician Arthur Russell, from which the work takes its title.

Imogen Stidworthy’s complex film installation I Hate (2007), located in the Museum Fridericianum, examines dimensions of language and self expression through speech, sound and image. Stidworthy’s subject, photographer Edward Woodman, lost his power of speech in an accident in 2001. On a large screen we see and hear Woodman as he attempts to form words with his speech therapist, as the words are repeated, and varied they become gradually detached from their meaning. A series of photographs taken by Woodman since his accident are displayed on screens opposite. The photos, of the new Eurostar terminal in London, represent Woodman’s use of photography to situate himself in the world where as a professional photographer he previously documented contemporary art exhibitions.

Elsewhere in the Museum Fridericianum, Tseng Yu-Chin’s video, Who’s Listening? (2003-04), relays the intimate interactions between a mother and her four year old son as they frolic in front of the camera. While on an adjacent monitor, Chinese performance artist Lin Yilin doggedly moves a concrete brick wall, brick by brick, from one side of the street to the other, as blank faced bystanders watch on.

A tram ride from the main exhibition sites, in the basement of a former tent factory, is an engaging video by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, whose social meddling incites less placid responses than those of Yilin’s. For Them (2007) Zmijewski brought together four groups of politically polarised groups, inviting them to meet and debate their political convictions through communally executed paint-and-paper murals. Zmijewski’s video documents the ensuing exchanges as they deteriorate from considered alterations to the painted banners of opposing groups to frenziedly burning and hurling the remains of the defaced placards through the window.

In addition to the gallery based moving image work at Documenta 12, the film programme presents 50 full length programmes, each screened twice over the 100 day course of the exhibition. Curated by Alexander Howarth, director of the Austrian Film Museum, the programme offers a more historical selection of films, spanning the second half of cinema, from the mid 50’s onwards. The film programme is hosted nightly at Kassel’s Gloria Kino, which originally opened in 1955, the year of the first Documenta. The programme includes work by 94 film-makers in total, among them James Benning, Robert Smithson, Chris Marker, Robert Frank, Jean Rouch, David Cronenberg and Stan Brakhage.

In collaboration with Documenta’s film programme a trailer taken from a short film by previous LAFVA awardee Mark Lewis will be screening before main features at cinemas across Germany throughout the course of the exhibition. Shot in London's financial district, Lewis' film is a study of the distinct light and the long shadows it casts over the fleeting shadows of unknowing commuters.

Watch a clip from Mark Lewis’ film Rush Hour, Morning and Evening Cheapside.

The exhibition closes on 23 September, for more information visit the Documenta website.