Cyrill Lachauer: The Sunset Route at Kunstpalais Erlangen
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Cyrill Lachauer at Kunstpalais: When Landscapes Become Stories
With The Sunset Route, Kunstpalais Erlangen presents an exhibition that combines photography, film, and installative narrative forms into a dense artistic experience. At the center is Cyrill Lachauer's view of landscape as a politically and culturally charged space that makes visible questions of freedom, self-determination, colonization, exclusion, and exploitation. The exhibition runs at Kunstpalais from June 20 to September 27, 2026, and features works from the years 2020 to 2026. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
Narrative Landscapes Instead of Mere Views
Lachauer thinks of landscape not as a backdrop but as a speaking place. His works arise from travels through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia, from encounters with routes, border zones, and transitional spaces. This perspective shapes the aesthetic experience of the exhibition: images, films, and objects interconnect and open up an examination of works where memory, movement, and social reality become inseparable. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
Between Freight Trains, Migration, and the Present
The title The Sunset Route refers to a railway line over 3,000 kilometers long in the southern USA. Lachauer began traveling himself as a train hopper in 2019; this led to the long-term project Slack, which resonates in the exhibition alongside the two new short films The Prologue and The Epilogue. Thus emerges a multifaceted narrative about mobility, precarity, and the desire for a self-determined life. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
Photography as Montage, Film as Memory Archive
The connection between photographic series and film works is particularly striking. Cardboard & Copenhagen was shot exclusively with disposable cameras and translates being on the go into casual, fragmented images. The series Birds (Nat. Geo. 1989–1999) collages landscape photographs into an abstracted bird's head, condensing beauty, destruction, and resistance into a poetic image figure. At Kunstpalais, these works are newly arranged installatively, creating an intense space between documentation and imagination. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
Curating, Context, and Art Historical Relevance
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Goetz Collection in Munich and Kunstpalais, curated by Susanne Touw and Malte Lin-Kröger. Art historically, Lachauer's work is located at the intersection of photography, film, land art, and social storytelling. This openness makes The Sunset Route an exhibition that not only views but intellectually engages. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
Conclusion
The Sunset Route promises a thoughtful, visually powerful art experience for all who understand contemporary art as open research. Those who engage with this exhibition will discover landscape not as an idyll, but as a memory space full of political, poetic, and human traces. A visit to Kunstpalais is definitely worthwhile. ([erlangen.de](https://erlangen.de/aktuelles/cyrill-lachauer-the-sunset-route))
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- Website: https://www.cyrilllachauer.net/
