Raha Raissnia (born 1968, Tehran, Iran) is a contemporary artist based in New York City, known for her painting, drawing, filmmaking and performance art.
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.
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.
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".
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..."[10] 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.
"[12] In 2013, at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Raissnia presented Series in Fugue, an exhibition with panels of oil and gesso, works on paper and films.
[13] At the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Raissnia showed Longing (2014), a three-part 16mm black-and-white and color film developed from a series of visits to East Harlem, New York.
In addition to positive-negative reversals, known as solarization, the work is accompanied by a soundtrack by Panagiotis Mavridis, who composed it using rolls of celluloid film mounted on gear motors.
The show was featured in Artforum as a critics' pick, with Zack Hatfield penning: "While a different artist might have used this backstory to evoke annihilative neglect concerning personal and national memory, Raissnia, through her process, suggests a more generative decay.
With Sultanate Architecture, a set of 35mm slides discarded by Brooklyn College, as the source material, the show interrogated "the camera's capacity to faithfully record subjects or to represent historical memory".
The Brooklyn Rail remarked that the show "animates the viewer's relationship with Raissnia's found photographs, and evokes the embodied perceptual experience of moving through an architectural environment".