(e)scape goat

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

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.

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

“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."

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.

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'.

Computer sounds and programmed movements erase the boundary between document and fiction. A constructed, almost magical environment is superimposed onto everyday images, imbuing them with an elusive sense of the otherworldly. Mysteries exists in murky dialogue with Signal to Noise, whose subjects appear here ten years later.

Video work from collaborative exhibition "once in a hundred years" at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, featuring artists Sid Iandovka, Anya Tsyrlina, Leslie Thornton, and Thomas Zummer.