Smoke and Fire and Electricity

Event Notes: E-WERK Luckenwalde will present Smoke and Fire and Electricity at the Bauhaus Stadttheater in Luckenwalde this Autumn, running parallel to the major exhibition Electricity conceived by artist 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 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997) 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.

Helen Turner, Artistic Director, E-WERK Luckenwalde, said, 

“It’s an honour to present Smoke and Fire and Electricity at the Bauhaus Stadttheater – one of Luckenwalde’s most extraordinary modernist buildings; and one of the many our city is the proud custodians for. Ever since we began E-WERK in 2019, we have been fascinated with the architectural history of Luckenwalde, and feel very lucky to have the City of Luckenwalde’s support in opening up these remarkable spaces to experimental forms of artistic encounter. I couldn’t think of a more perfect setting to host a David Lynch marathon, and just wish Lynch was here today to experience it with us. I am sure he would have been entranced with the quotidian and surreal ruptures the city possesses.”

As Lynch himself said “I just love electricity. I like smoke and fire and electricity, these things are mesmerising.” (Mark Kermode, “David Lynch,” The Guardian, 8 February 2007.) 

Across these films, electricity is more than an aesthetic motif: it becomes a medium through which the visible and invisible worlds connect. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, electrical currents, lights and transmissions become bound to supernatural presence and the passage between worlds; in Lost Highway, electricity accompanies moments of rupture, transformation and the breakdown of stable identity. Across all three, electricity becomes a language for forces that cannot quite be seen or explained, something that connects, transmits, disturbs and suddenly transforms the everyday into the uncanny.

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.

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.

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.

More about the Bauhaus Stadttheater in Luckenwalde:

In 1926, the city of Luckenwalde announced a competition for the design of a new school building. The requirements included the incorporation of a school auditorium that could be used as a stage. The winner was Count Graf, Luckenwalde’s city architect. The project was carried out between 1927 and 1930 with the collaboration of City Architect Brennecke and architect Backe.

More information about Electricity by Asad Raza which takes place concurrently at E-WERK Luckenwalde: 

Long before electricity was generated, it was conducted. The Earth is continually traversed by currents that precede and exceed electrical systems. Solar radiation, atmospheric charge, flowing water, roots, nerves and power grids each transmit transformations from one body to another. Conductivity is not confined to metals or machines; it describes a more general capacity to receive, transform and pass something onward. A conductor is never simply an object. It exists through what moves across it.

For the exhibition Electricity, Asad Raza responds directly to the context of E-WERK Luckenwalde as a reactivated power station by artist Pablo Wendel, and approaches electricity not as an invisible utility or technological achievement, but as something earthly, ontological and sublime. Visitors move through the site in small groups led by a conductor, who guides attention through a sequence of encounters. Electrostatic machines, moving image, sound, vibration, saltwater, amber, charcoal, ash, timber, plants and live actions appear as temporary conductors, each receiving and transmitting forces according to its own material properties.

Conceived as a single dramaturgy rather than a collection of discrete installations, the exhibition also incorporates works by Tino Sehgal and Sung Tieu. Their contributions enter into the exhibition’s evolving network of transmissions, extending its exploration of how movement, attention and exchange circulate between bodies. At E-WERK Luckenwalde, where electricity continues to be generated throughout the exhibition, the power station becomes more than a site of production. It becomes a place in which the invisible passages that continually compose our reality become sensible.

The exhibition is open Saturday and Sundays between 1pm – 6pm and is only possible to attend via a conductor led tour. Tickets can be purchased here. 

Electricity is also accompanied by a seven-month public programme featuring a rotating film exhibition comprising three chapters, “Electric Sublime,” “Electric Power,” and “Electric Earth” featuring work by Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Bengolea, David Lynch, Doug Aitken, Harun Farocki, P. Staff, Rachel Rose, Raven Chacon, Saodat Ismailova. (September 12 2026 – April 25 2027) and a symposium with performances by Raven Chacon, Abbas Zahedi, and a key note by historian of science Simon Schaffer (April 24 2027). 

About the artists in the program: 

About Franziska Aigner

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.

About Sainkho Namtchylak

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.

About German Popov

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. G. 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, G. Popov has produced several tracks and albums in recent years.

About Olga Hohmann

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.

About Yannick Wittman 

Yannick 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.

About David Lynch

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.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) returns to the final days of Laura Palmer, the young woman whose murder forms the centre of Twin Peaks. Moving between the recognisable world of small-town America and a realm of dreams, violence and supernatural presence, the film pushes the series’ uncanny atmosphere into something darker and more intimate. Electricity runs through this world as both material reality and mysterious force: television static, flickering lights, power lines, the Palmer family’s ceiling fan and the figure of the Electrician recur alongside moments of supernatural intrusion. Here electricity becomes a kind of unstable medium — carrying signals, disturbances and presences between worlds, while making the familiar suddenly strange.

Lost Highway (1997)

In Lost Highway (1997), Lynch constructs a world in which identity, time and reality continually fold back upon themselves. A mysterious videotape begins to destabilise the apparently ordinary life of musician Fred Madison, leading into a fractured narrative in which characters and identities transform and the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes impossible to secure. Electricity accompanies these ruptures: flashes, electrical disturbances and sudden changes in light mark transitions between different states of being and different versions of reality. The film’s title itself suggests a journey without a stable destination — a road that loops, disappears and returns, much like the electrical currents that seem to run beneath its shifting realities.

16 October 2026
15:00 – 00:00 
Stadttheater Luckenwalde, Grünstraße 14, 14943 Luckenwalde

Images courtesy of E-Werk Luckenwalde. Photo: © Peter Migulla