E-WERK Luckenwalde

Smoke and Fire and Electricity
Film and Music Marathon
Stadttheater Luckenwalde, Grünstraße 14, 14943 Luckenwalde
16 October 15:00 – 00:00

Featuring works by David Lynch, and performances by Olga Hohmann with Yannik Wittmann, Franziska Aigner, and Sainkho Namtchylak with German Popov

On Friday 16 October 2026, E-WERK Luckenwalde will present Smoke and Fire and Electricity at the Stadttheater Luckenwalde, running parallel to major exhibition Electricity by Asad Raza at E-WERK. The programme honours the legacy of David Lynch and his recurring, devoted explorations of electricity - as cinematic motif, as natural phenomenon, as language of the unconscious. It also marks a continued relationship between Lynch and Raza; who have worked together across previous projects.

For Lynch, electricity was at once beautiful, unsettling, unknown, sublime. Something adjacent to the unconscious that could mesmerise, crackle, arc and disturb. This film and music marathon takes Lynch’s fascination as its point of departure, bringing film, music and live performance together as an extended encounter with the electric sublime.

The evening will present selected feature films including Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Inland Empire (2006) that resonate with Lynch’s obsession with electricity, in addition to rare short films including Lumiere (1995), Out Yonder Neighbour Boy (2001) and Industrial Landscape (2008). These will be punctuated by musical and performative interludes by Olga Hohmann with Yannick Wittman, Tuvan throat singer Sainkho Namtchylak with German Popov, and cellist and singer Franziska Aigner aka FRANKIE, expanding the cinematic experience into live space.

The event will unfold within the striking modernist architecture of Luckenwalde’s Stadttheater. Built between 1927 and 1930 as part of the Friedrich-Ebert-Schule, the theatre is one of the city’s defining works of New Architecture, with its geometric forms, vivid colours and expressive interior creating an unusually cinematic environment.

About the artists

David Lynch (1946–2025) was an American filmmaker, artist and musician whose work repeatedly unsettled the boundary between the ordinary and the uncanny. Across films including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and the television series Twin Peaks, Lynch transformed familiar spaces, sounds and objects — suburban homes, diners, roads, telephones, lamps, televisions — into portals to something strange, psychological and unknowable. Electricity was one of his most persistent fascinations. As Lynch himself put it, he loved “smoke and fire and electricity”: its beauty, sound, power and capacity to disturb. In his work, electrical currents, flickering lights, power lines and interference become more than visual effects: they suggest transmission, rupture and forces operating just beyond what can be seen or understood.

In Solo Sunny and the Invisible Force, Olga Hohmann together with pianist Yannick Wittman will take the iconic song from Konrad Wolf’s 1980 film Solo Sunny, a landmark film of East German cinema which follows a young singer performing in smoky bars, as the starting point for their performance. Deconstructing and rebuilding the song, whose shifting colours evoke different moods, Hohmann will explore longing, invisibility and emancipation through the idea of electricity as a force generated by friction and influence between two magnetic poles. Drawing on her great-grandfather’s collection of now-defunct electrical magic tricks, as well as his work as a nuclear physicist, the performance will move between failed magic, invisible forces and the generation of energy.

Olga Hohmann is a Berlin-based artist working across performance, music, installation and writing. Her practice often brings together voice, language, sound and theatricality, creating situations in which the boundaries between concert, performance and visual art become fluid. Her work is characterised by a fascination with transformation, ambiguity and the charged space between the intimate and the uncanny. She has presented performances and exhibitions internationally.

Yannick Wittman is a pianist and musician working across contemporary music, performance and experimental practice. His approach moves between composed and improvised forms, bringing sensitivity to texture, rhythm and atmosphere. For Smoke and Fire and Electricity, he accompanies Olga Hohmann on piano, providing a live musical structure through which her reworking of Solo Sunny can unfold.

For Smoke and Fire and Electricity, Austrian artist Franziska Aigner, aka FRANKIE, will perform with cello and voice, bringing the dreamlike, corporeal register of her work into the programme. Her approach hints at the mystical and unknown dimensions inherent to electricity, its capacity to vibrate, transform, transmit and act at a distance, connecting the physical world to forces that remain invisible. This sensibility resonates with the uncanny atmosphere and psychological intensity of Lynch’s work, particularly Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, where sound, image and bodily experience continually slip between the tangible and the unknowable.

Franziska Aigner is an artist, performer, musician, and philosopher working at the intersection of performance, music, and philosophy. She studied choreography and dance at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and has collaborated with Anne Imhof, William Forsythe, Mette Ingvartsen, Alexandra Bachzetsis, and Holly Herndon. Her own performances have been presented internationally at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, HAU, brut, Theatre de la Bastille, The Place, and Die Liste. As musician FRANKIE, she performs cello and vocals and has released several EPs and albums, including collaborations with Battle-Ax and Kelman Duran. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London and her monograph on Kant and technics was published with Bloomsbury Press in 2024.

The extraordinary voice of Tuvan-Austrian singer and sound artist Sainkho Namtchylak meets the electronics and traditional instruments of German Popov in a performance that moves beyond conventional distinctions between song, noise, language and ritual. Namtchylak is known for her use of Tuvan throat and overtone singing, combining traditional Siberian vocal techniques with free improvisation, jazz and electronic music, while Popov is a long-standing collaborator, working with electronics and traditional instruments including igil and doshpuluur. There is something of Lynch’s own surreal logic in Namtchylak’s extraordinary vocal presence: the uncanny emerges suddenly from the familiar, creating a fissure in the everyday through something unexpected, strange or sublime. Like Lynch’s abrupt shifts from the mundane to the disturbing, the disconcerting quality lies precisely in the rupture, in the sense that anything might suddenly appear, without warning or explanation.

Sainkho Namtchylak is a Tuvan-Austrian singer, sound artist and composer whose extraordinary vocal practice brings together traditional Tuvan throat and overtone singing with free improvisation, avant-garde jazz, electronics and contemporary composition. Born in Tuva, southern Siberia, she studied music in Kyzyl and Moscow before becoming a member of the Tuvan State Folk Ensemble and later the experimental ensemble Tri-O. Since the early 1990s, she has been based in Austria and has collaborated with artists across experimental music, jazz and contemporary art. Her voice, spanning an exceptional range, moves between breath, overtone, speech, song and radically extended vocal techniques, producing a sound that can seem at once elemental, animal, intimate and otherworldly.

German Popov is a musician-multi instrumentalist, composer, sound artist and researcher. Throughout all of his projects he works on establishing the lost contacts with sources and archetypes of modernity. A significant part of his research is dedicated to incorporating ethnographic and anthropological data into artistic activities. He has been involved in various musical and social events focused on the topic of Central Asia. Under the stage name OMFO he published several musical works and soundtracks which reached a high degree of international popularity. His current research is based on combining ancient art forms with novel techno- scientific pursuits and performative concepts. Popov has been closely collaborating with Sainkho since the mid-nineties, performing traditional Tuva instruments at numerous concerts around the world. He participated in the recording of several of her albums published by Ponderosa Music, including the renowned "Step Mother City." In addition, Popov has produced several tracks and albums in recent years.

Smoke and Fire and Electricity is funded by Initiative Musik with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Additional support is provided by the City of Luckenwalde and the Stadttheater of Luckenwalde.