Raha Raissnia (b.1968, Iran, Tehran), lives and works in New York. Her practice is situated on the crossroad of painting, drawing and filmmaking, and how they are interconnected and enveloped in one another. She associates her work with Expanded Cinema practices, as she manipulates cinema’s structural elements in regards to space, time, frame, projectors and screen in live performances and loop installation.Her work is layered and permutational and combines both analog and digital technologies with a strong reliance on the hand made.
Raha Raissnia creates architectural and mazey spaces which combine abstract and figurative elements. They seem to incarnate movement and develop on their own. Sometimes such spaces are inhabited with phantom-like human figures, and at times they remain empty. Temples and shadowy streets of fantastic cities, arenas and structures that remind of scaffoldings, Raha Raissnia’s imagery crosses multiple references and interlaces different timelines. Memories of the past melt down to form a dreamlike vision of our bio-synthetic future.
The multidisciplinary interconnectedness of Raha Raissnia’s work creates a complex mise-en-abyme between architectonic elements and biomorphic geometry, shifting the viewer’s perspective between an anatomy of living organisms and advanced electronic circuitry, while passing through an array of influences and references that are at once both ancient and futuristic.