In the IBB Video Space
June 3–September 7, 2026
Alte Jakobstraße 124-128
Berlin 10969
Germany
Hours: Monday and Wednesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +49 30 78902600
bg@berlinischegalerie.de
The Berlinische Galerie presents two works of the artists Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi in the IBB Video Space.
Aralkum (2022, 14 mins.) was the first video work co-directed by the artists. The film serves as a memorial to the Aral Sea, which was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world until the 1960s but has now almost entirely dried up. Its transformation into a barren desert landscape is particularly visible in the border region between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. A vast expanse of arid land (the “Aralkum” of the title) now covers the area that was once a body of water. The video conveys with striking clarity how human intervention, specifically the Soviet Union’s destructive irrigation policies in support of cotton production, gradually destroyed an entire ecosystem and the life it sustained. The two filmmakers combine archival material with contemporary footage. Images of nature, still hauntingly beautiful despite the catastrophe, appear alongside intimate family scenes and shots of preserved animal specimens.
rückblickend betrachtet (in retrospect, 2025, 14 mins.) brings together three different historical moments. Munich’s Olympia-Einkaufszentrum or Olympia Shopping Centre was largely built in the 1970s by so-called “guest workers” and was considered the largest shopping centre in Europe at the time. In 1982, the Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless made the film Empfänger unbekannt (Addressee Unknown) in response to the increasingly overt hostility directed towards people labelled as “foreign” in West Germany. In 2016, nine people were murdered in a far-right terrorist attack at the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum. Zhluktenko and Asadi Faezi weave these layers together to show that racist violence is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a continuing historical trajectory.
Artist talk
Join Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi for an artist talk (in German) on their current screening at the Berlinische Galerie with curator Anne Bitterwolf. Free admission, registration required .
About the artists
Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi studied documentary filmmaking at the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. Their films have been screened and honoured at numerous international festivals, including the award for Best Short Film at Visions du Réel for Aralkum. rückblickend betrachtet premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, and it received the German Short Film Award.
Speaking of Video Art
You are invited to a series of discussions in German and English about the current programme in the IBB Video Space. In the first session based on the film rückblickend betrachtet, we will read the poem Mein Name ist Ausländer by the poet Semra Ertan, a letter by the filmmaker Sohrab Shahid Saless, and an excerpt from the book Undeutsch by the historian Fatima El-Tayeb. The following discussion focuses on questions of how racist structures are being made visible in texts as well as (moving) images. Moderated by Louisa Engel. Free admission, registration required .
