Two tardigrades in a lunar landscape, behind them stands an abstract, twisted shape – similar to a deformed rock or a twisted sculpture made of soft material. It looks as if it is made of glass or transparent plastic.

AkademieGalerie München

Merlin Stadler. Stilled Life

September 5 – September 21, 2025

Merlin Stadler, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, was awarded with the Media Art Award 2025 by the Kunststiftung Ingvild und Stephan Goetz for the realization of his 3D animated short film Stilled Life.

Stadler’s film project was inspired by an actual event; in 2019, the Beresheet moonlander crashed on its approach to the moon. In addition to human DNA, several thousand frozen tardigrades—microscopically small, extremely resistant organisms—were also on board. Stadler uses this event as the starting point for his speculative story about the possible colonization of the moon. The 3D-animated short film Stilled Life, in which he creates a future scenario on the moon, can now be seen in his exhibition at the AkademieGalerie.

The Media Art Award is a cooperation between the Sammlung Goetz, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and the Kunststiftung Ingvild and Stephan Goetz. It is awarded annually to support emerging artists in the field of media art, enabling them to create new works and strengthen their public recognition.

Sterling Ruby

July 16 – October 24, 2026 | Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster

The American artist Sterling Ruby, who lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his multi-disciplinary body of work, which includes sculptures, ceramics, bronzes, collages, textiles, and expansive spray-painted canvases in which he intertwines a wide variety of autobiographical, art historical, and sociological sources. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, Ruby explores the idea of a non-hierarchical and borderless universe. The exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz /Schaufenster lends insight into his multifaceted artistic practice through a selection of works created between 2008 and 2016.

Cyrill Lachauer. The Sunset Route

June 20 – September 27, 2026 | Kunstpalais Erlangen

feat. Mike Brodie, Mouse Green, Rhyw, Mia Justice Smith, Moritz Stumm

In the exhibition The Sunset Route, on view at the Kunstpalais Erlangen and created in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz, Cyrill Lachauer presents works from 2020 to 2025, a period during which he traveled on freight trains through the USA, Mexico, and Bosnia. In the spirit of poetic ethnography, he created photographs and films that are now being shown together for the first time. They all explore questions of freedom, self-determination, and resistance, as well as colonization, exclusion, and exploitation.

Ilinca Fechete. Memory Magnified by Memory of Course

September 5 – September 18, 2026 | AkademieGalerie

“I imagine a situation in which several people are standing together, and I am one of them. One person at a time is subjected to an electrical shock although their identity is concealed, as the electrical connection remains out of sight. All I can do is observe the facial expressions and reactions of the others to identify who has been shocked,” explains the artist Ilinca Fechete. Her new work made possible by the 2026 Media Art Award awarded by the Ingvild and Stephan Goetz Art Foundation in collaboration with the Sammlung Goetz and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, consists of an ultrasound sound system and a visual program for a film.