The landscape as an expressive space imbued with meaning is a point of reference to which Cyrill Lachauer (born in 1979 in Rosenheim, Germany) repeatedly returns in his photographic and film work. With a keen sense of historical and political contexts, Lachauer traveled extensively throughout the United States, Mexico, and Bosnia over many years. The exhibition The Sunset Route at Kunstpalais brings together works created between 2020 and 2025 that address pressing questions in the form of a poetic (auto)ethnography: questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, but also colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.

The title The Sunset Route refers to the railway line of the same name, which is over 3,000 kilometers long and connects the interior of the United States with the Pacific coast in the far south of the country. Since the end of the 19th century, hobos and other transient people have been traveling on this and other routes on freight trains through North America. Lachauer himself began crossing the country as a train hopper in 2019. This phase led to the film project Slack, on which Lachauer worked with US photographer Mike Brodie from 2022 to 2025. The work commemorates Brodie's late partner Mia Justice Smith, alias Slack, who is also symbol of a generation marked by the fentanyl crisis, social media, and a personal desire for freedom. The Slack universe includes two new short films shown for the first time, The Prologue (in collaboration with Rhyw) and The Epilogue (in collaboration with Mouse Green and Moritz Stumm). They expand on the railroad motif with industrial relics from the Nazi era in Bosnia and the dangerous migration from Mexico to the US.

The exhibition also provides an in-depth insight into Lachauer's photographic work. The extensive series Cardboard & Copenhagen and Birds (Nat. Geo. 1989–1999) are based on different concepts and each play with their own unique aesthetic. Cardboard & Copenhagen was shot exclusively with disposable cameras and accordingly captures casual moments from life on freight trains – constantly on the move and only temporarily coming to rest on insulating cardboard sheets. For the Birds series, Lachauer collaged landscape photographs from a decade of National Geographic magazine into abstract bird figures. They document the beauty and destructive decline of landscapes, but at the same time embody symbols of hope and resistance.

In this solo exhibition, as in previous presentations, Lachauer's works come together in site-specific installations. This reflects the artist's approach to places, materiality, and spirituality of the people and objects with whom, and not about whom, he speaks in his works. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Sammlung Goetz in Munich and Kunstpalais and is curated by Susanne Touw and Malte Lin-Kröger.

Slack was produced by the Sammlung Goetz and co-produced by the Ingvild and Stephan Goetz Art Foundation, Videoart at Midnight Productions and Flipping the Coin. Executive producers Susanne Touw and Nils Petersen. The Prologue (in collaboration with Rhyw) was produced by the Sammlung Goetz and the Autotelic Foundation. The Epilogue (in collaboration with Mouse Green and Moritz Stumm) was produced by the Sammlung Goetz.

The works shown in the exhibition were funded by: Berlinische Galerie - Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Jan Fischer, Ulrich and Nathan Köstlin, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Ingeborg Neumann, Sammlung R, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Scumeck Sabottka

Studio production Cyrill Lachauer by Nils Petersen / Flipping the Coin, Berlin

Image: Cyrill Lachauer, Slack, 2025, S16mm film, transferred to 2K video, 61:06 minutes, color, 5.1 stereo sound