Long-time friends and collaborators Raha Raissnia and Charles Curtis will perform their first collaborative expanded cinema piece titled Freeway I (2004-08), a recent work titled Nour, as well as premiering a new short piece called Solaria.

Using multiple 16mm and 35mm projectors, Raissnia layers moving and still images from nocturnal walks in New York into evolving compositions. Central to the work is superimposition: projections overlap, drift apart, and intersect in fleeting, unrepeatable constellations, making each performance a one-of-a-kind event.

Curtis’s live score, combining acoustic cello and electronics composed especially for each piece, responds in real time, weaving sound and light together. The performance invites the audience into a meditative experience where abstraction becomes a way of seeing differently, revealing unexpected moments of harmony and beauty within landscapes marked by technological and ecological transformation.

World premiere of new work "Solaria" alongside "Freeway I" (2004–08) and "Nour".

Raha Raissnia (b. 1968, Tehran, Iran) lives and works between New York City and Athens, Greece. A multidisciplinary artist with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1992) and an MFA from Pratt Institute (2002), she merges painting, filmmaking, and drawing to explore their intersections in materiality and process. Her work, rooted in Expanded Cinema practices, manipulates structural elements like space, time, and projection through live performances and loop installations. Combining analog and digital technologies with a handmade approach, Raissnia’s layered practice creates a mise en abyme between architectural and biomorphic forms, blending organic and electronic references.
Her exhibitions include solo shows at The Drawing Center (New York, 2018), MoMA (New York, 2016), and Empty Gallery (Hong Kong, 2022), as well as participation in the Venice Biennale (2015) and Greater New York (MoMA PS1, 2021-22).

Charles Curtis is one of the premiere avant-garde cellists of the modern era. Trained at Juilliard, Curtis was also a pupil both of vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and composer La Monte Young, and he is one of the few musicians to have mastered Young’s rigorous practice of just intonation. Curtis has performed and premiered modern classical, minimalist, and chamber music compositions all around the world. Numerous major composers—La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, and Tashi Wada among them—have written works specifically for him. Curtis is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. Recent releases include Performances and Recordings 1998–2018 (2020)