The Berlinische Galerie’s birthday summer is drawing to a close. Before it ends, Berlin Art Week adds one last highlight. Three artists, two formats, and a festive end to a season that, while not consistently sunny, was celebratory nonetheless. In his first feature film Slack, Cyrill Lachauer climbs freight trains across the U.S., traveling along the societal margins with photographer Mike Brodie. The search is not only for lost fathers but also to explore how images can have an impact in a world shaped by TikTok aesthetics and drug crises. At the center is the memory of Brodie’s late partner, Mia Justice Smith, nicknamed Slack, whose ashes become a symbol for a generation trying to find itself between post-punk, drifting, and an uncompromising desire for freedom while exposing the American Dream as a farce. Slack (2025, 60 min.) is neither a conventional documentary nor pure fiction, but a cinematic drift — poetic and contradictory. Its German premiere is on Saturday (13.09.) at Babylon*.
Other drifts take form in the sculptures of Abie Franklin and Daniel Hölzl. After Hölzl’s work Soft Cycles adorned the museum’s canopy for the Berlinische Galerie’s 50th anniversary, the two now present Bycatch as part of the Hallen Art Festival. Inflatable tetrapods (precisely engineered coastal defense structures from the 1950s) proliferate like organic flotsam. The title references bycatch in fishing: everything unintentionally caught in the net. Bycatch embodies the paradox of our present: that every protective measure creates new risks. A summer drifting in all directions one last time — Slack, Bycatch, Soft Cycles.
Text: Inga Krumme / Credit: Abie Franklin & Daniel Hölzl; Cyrill Lachauer
Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstr.124–128, 10969 Berlin–Kreuzberg; map
Artist Talk with Cyrill Lachauer and Mike Brodie at the IBB Video Room (in English)
14.09.2025 Free admission, but RSVP here.
Babylon Berlin, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, 10178 Berlin–Mitte; map
Slack premiere 13.09.2025. Free admission, remaining tickets are at the door.
Bycatch as part of the Hallen 06 Art Festival (06.–14.09.2025), organized by Wilhelm Studios.
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