Raha Raissnia (born 1968, Tehran, Iran) is a contemporary artist based in New York City, known for her painting, drawing, filmmaking and performance art. Raissnia manipulates cinema's structural elements in loop installations and live performances. She often alters and tunes the mechanical parts of her film projectors, relying on her hand and playing them similarly to the way musicians play instruments.
Raissnia presented a solo exhibition in 2017–2018 at the Drawing Center in New York, and in 2016, her work was the subject of a solo presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, also in New York. Her work has also been featured in the 56th Venice Biennale, All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor and has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and at The Kitchen in New York, among others.
Early life and career
Raissnia grew up in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79. She cites her trips to the city center with her father, an amateur photographer, to document the protests against the Shah as a formative experience. In 1983, Raissnia and her mother were exiled to France, eventually emigrating to Houston, Texas where her mother's brother was residing. Raha and her family benefited from the Shah and Western corporate influence and wealth, which is the reason why her and her mother got exiled into France, eventually moving to Houston where her mother's brother was residing.
She received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, and a M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2002. From 1995 to 1999, Raissnia worked at the Anthology Film Archives. Her exposure to avant-garde filmmaking during this time has deeply influenced her practice. She held her first solo show there in 2002, followed by her first performance work, Systems in collaboration with Briggan Krauss at the Thomas Erben Gallery (New York) in 2004.
Work
Raissnia's paintings, drawings, films, and performances are interdependent, drawing equally from "the gestural and photographic, the figurative and abstract." At key in her practice are qualities specific to still and moving imagery, which are often differentiated and combined. She renders "their boundaries ambiguous by manipulating and layering her source materials", and subsequently, her works have aspects of both but belong to neither. In describing her works, Raissnia has said: "My paintings brought abstraction to the vision I captured from the world on film and now the films are bringing elements of reality into my paintings." In addition, Raissnia uses drawing to investigate how films and paintings influence one another. Amber Harper at The Drawing Center has remarked that Raissnia's work "speaks to the possibility of drawing, above all, as a way to revisit, abstract, question, and change the images we use to construct identity." In this way, Raissnia's works continually generate levels of signification and interpretation that coexist.
Music and sound also play a crucial role in Raissnia's practice, both inspiring and forming completed works. In BOMB magazine, Jeanne Liotta has commented that Raissnia "made a painting and bombarded it with light and sound", resulting in a "wild ephemeral synaesthesia". In another instance, Milton Cruz has described Raissnia's drawings as "intricate rhythms and musical modulations". Raissnia has stated that her work "aspires to music and develops like a musical piece."
Major works
In 2006, Raissnia held Stele, her first solo show at Miguel Abreu Gallery. Her gestural paintings were described as "sanded to an absolute smoothness, a silky finish at odds with the angularity of content", while the drawings were detailed as being "so packed, so thick, their shiny skein becomes almost reflective..." In her second solo show at the gallery, Raissnia presented Free Way, a film installation consisting of collaged 16 and 35 mm filmstrips with hand-processed, hand-painted, and manipulated materials pressed between glass slides. Accompanied by Charles Curtis's minimalist soundtrack, Free Way included segments of still life photograph with paint and ink drawings reworked and scratched into acetate sheets, as well as sections from human x-rays. The filmmaking process is developed by breaking apart the cinematic movements of film into three components: three slides are projected side-by-side and partly overlap in the middle, while an 18 frame per second 16mm film is superimposed over the left image. This results in a slow-moving montage that is both temporary and aleatory. The New Yorker noted that "the ghosts of Moholy-Nagy, the Russian Constructivists, and Stan Brakhage haunt[ed]" the show.
