Anna Tsyrlina

‘And so I hid in caverns in the mountains; I began to wander, like a meteor’

The film details the early years of the legendary Siberian Punk/Rock group 'Гражданская Оборона' (Grazhdanskaya Oborona), and its frontman, Egor Letov.

Made from surviving early 1990s 'hi8' videotape of "schwimmen," a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk, and comprising footage shot entirely within and/or from the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, "phenomenon" radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being and ultimately tapping into vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral “paranormal” space - both historical and metaphorical - where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings - innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades: the unit of “what happens” not an event, but an experience, as it falls oblivion together with the anonymous dreaming collective to which it occurred.

A random seventies newsreel from the artists’ hometown in Soviet Siberia forms the substratum for a relentless exploration of representational and narrative strategies: without ever collapsing into a ‘story’ or abstraction, the film recants the relationship between analogue and digital, surface and reference, sense and experience, past and present. –Thomas Zummer

jason from the lake is an imaginary, nomadic electro-industrial band that has existed forever, yet debuted live in 2024 at the legendary Bad Bonn Kilbi Festival. Emerging from the Siberian experimental noise scene of the 90s, their performances weave dense electro soundscapes with visuals, creating immersive night rituals, haunting collages and visceral audiovisual experiences that bridge memory and technology.

The most recent work presented in the retrospective, assembled primarily from the directors’ own archives and depicting Novosibirsk’s music scene of the 1990s. A fragmented form and shifting rhythm characterise the visual element of the film as well as its auditory dimension. Guitar noise dissolves into hauntological film loops and indistinct speech merges with fragments of radio and television broadcasts.

Six minutes of dancing and trances, a spontaneous orgiastic performance slowed down and drowned in digital effects and overlays. The music heard off screen is written by Sid Iandovka and is as rhythmic as it is viscous. The movements of bodies and costumes hint at both playful carnivals and mysterious rituals.

Perhaps the spiritual prequel to Live the Life You LOVE, Peter the Wolf is one of the earliest extant video works by Iandovka & Tsyrlina. Featuring footage shot during a spontaneous trip to the first Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2000, the filmmakers’ voyeuristic camerawork drinks in the scene, alternating between close-ups and wide shots of unaware partygoers and police monitoring the proceedings. Besides the obvious differences between the two works — the Y2K-era ravewear and the absence of phones — Peter the Wolf utilizes music to similarly displace the visuals from mere reportage. In this case, the video’s 8-bit soundtrack was recorded from a group jam session on hacked Nintendos. The gaiety and nostalgia in our contemporary viewing of this dawn-of-the-millennium happening is tempered by the suggestion of surveillance in the camera’s perspective, induced more explicitly by the brief shot of satellite dishes and radio aerials in the film’s final seconds.

The birth of a new era in the first years of perestroika with its enthusiasm for clairvoyance and the dying practice of shooting on film are both contained within a single minute of screen time, during which a mnemonist ‘recalls’ an infinitely large number displayed on a board behind him.

Tsyrlina’s radical found footage film subjects frames and sequences taken from Soviet propaganda about women’s equality to a cinematic archaeology, unearthing a sensuous and discreetly subversive movement within the material’s interstices and ellipses.

Taking as a starting point an artist's own paintings, long lost, and recasting what a work can be with interventions of digital post-cinematic processes, a minor piece of damage explores the space between the vanished place of referential origin and its re-presentation as a cinematic 'artefact'.

“The surface of a thing is not part of it. Thus the surface of water does not form part of the water, nor does it consequently form part of the atmosphere. Then what divides water from air?” To Leonardo da Vinci’s question, the poet Daniil Charms answered: "The water is like a wheel."

By intertwining different visual layers, the artists introduce pluralities in processing sensory information. They engage in new forms of visualisation in the configuration of possible worlds. With escape goat they want the work to create itself 'on its own terms': unsteady and strange, untethered to familiar orders of mediated perception.