Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer
Film with Live Score / Music / Visual Art
Adapting the French name for contralight, Contre Jour is a project in evolution for more than thirty years, bringing together the artistic vision of Canadian photographer and multimedia artist Leah Singer with American composer, guitarist, and producer Lee Ranaldo, a founding member of Sonic Youth.
Singer and Ranaldo break traditional dynamics between performer and audience to examine how live image and sound might interact. Contre Jour, the shadow is introduced as an integral part of the performance. Ranaldo and the suspended guitar cast their omnipresnet shadows on the screen, staging a dialogue with the projections. A folding in of prior documented performances featuring shadows creates a mise en abyme setting. Contre Jour was invited to GNRation, Porto (2024), the arts festival Dark Mofo, in Tasmania (2023), and the S8 International Film Festival, A Coruna, Spain (2022) among others.
The entire action of “Contre Jour” takes place between the projection of the images and the screen, precisely so that, through the experimentation and unexpected cuts, there is this light of shadow on the screen, of the body of the guitar and of the body of the guitarist and author. This place without space, full of presence and absolute dynamics — nothing static. Ricardo Vicente Paredes, Rimas e Batidas, 2024
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Leah Singer is a visual artist and journalist born in Winnipeg, Canada, based in New York City. Her artwork extends to film/video, photography, and printmaking with an eye to distilling imagery to elemental forms. The Ruby Drawings an evolving print series of ambiguous works created from overlapped silhouette shapes have been exhibited most recently at Picture Theory and Opening Gallery, in New York City. Live image and sound performances of Contre Jour, the three-decade collaboration with her partner, the musician Lee Ranaldo, have been presented worldwide including at the 2024 edition of the Ziro Festival in India. A retrospective of her experimental films as well as the latest iteration of Contre Jour premiered at the 2022 S8 Cinema Festival in A Coruña, Spain. Editions of her graphic newspaper, Copy, are in various collections including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Singer writes about art and artists for numerous publications including Ursula and Apartamento, where she is a contributing editor. Her oral history interviews with visual artists are collected in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
IG: @leahsinger8
Lee Ranaldo is a musician, visual artist, and writer. He co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active in New York’s downtown community and internationally since then as composer, performer and producer, also exhibiting visual art and publishing several books of journals, poetry and writings on music. Recent live performances with partner Leah Singer, Contre Jour, have been large scale, multi-projection sound and light events with suspended electric guitar phenomena that challenge the usual performer/audience relationship. The solo acoustic composition In Virus Times was released in November 2021 on Mute Records. Sonic Youth released Walls Have Ears in February 2024 on Goofin’ Records. In July 2024 Lee toured across Canada with Medicine Singers. Their single ‘Honor Song’ was released in October 2023 on Stone Tapes/Joyful Noise. He lives and works in New York City.
IG: @leeranaldo
