Screening: Raha Raissna & Stom Sogo
Raha and Stom have been on each other’s minds and in each other’s spaces for 15 years. This night event traces the creases and borderlines of this relation and the various axes of their realms. Stom and Raha, like two planes intersecting, describe a space mapped out through slides, film, video, and installation. They take on the invisible moments of the everyday: the subjective drugs and Father, long train trips and TV static, exploring ligaments of industry and corridors of prayer.
Raha Raissnia emigrated from Iran to the United States in 1983. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 and her MFAfrom Pratt institute in 2002. From 1992 to 1995, between her two degrees, Raissnia worked as an intern and a full time employee at Anthology Film Archives in New York, a time that she describes as being “directly formative years” for her exposure and knowledge of avant-garde cinema as well as for the paintings she made during this period. In all of her gallery exhibitions and in various configurations she has presented elements of all three areas of her practice; that is painting, drawing, and filmmaking.
She has had solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY), Thomas Erben Gallery (NY), Galerie Xippas (Paris) and the Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art, Isfahan, Iran.
Stom Sogo started Open Screenings at Anthology Film Archives back in 1995 inspiring a whole crew of filmmakers …and has gone on to make some of the most gorgeous super-8mm films around. His films have shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival & the Whitney Biennale and have toured Russia as part of Avant-Garde Alternatives: an evolution of American experimental film (Cinema Museum, Moscow, Freud Museum & Academy of Fine Art St. Petersburg & Dom Kino Yekaterinburg). He currently lives and works in Osaka, Japan.
