Ab-Anbar gallery, a new multidisciplinary contemporary art centre in downtown Tehran announces its next exhibition on December 4th, featuring works by Raha Raissnia to be exhibited for the first time in Tehran.
Selected Works: Raha Raissnia is an exhibition of Raha’s dense, explorations of light which manifest as works on paper, paintings and film installations. Described as a ‘night-painter’, one that Milton Cruz situates as having a habit of “starting from the other side of things”, theses works emerge from stillness, silence and darkness whilst operating at the fleeting moment of being half-awake, as light flutters between the hallucinatory that is difficult to wrap around consciousness.
Alongside paintings and some works on paper, her 16 mm film Longing, 2015, which was selected as part of All the World's Future at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor will be installed as a loop. This film for its starting point drew from much raw footage Raissnia took in a series of visits to a poor neighbourhood in New York's East Harlem. An earlier film Chaleh Harz, 2011, also on view used as its starting point raw footage she took of slums of Darvazeh Ghar, south of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, in 1998. Both these films were made through a very layered process of re-filming raw material in studio that combined found imagery with hand painted slides projecting them on screens and paintings made by the artist before they were finished onto 16mm film.
