Zosha Warpeha: Long Exposure

Wednesday, November 12th at 8pm, ISSUE presents 2025 Artist-In-Residence Zosha Warpeha’s culminating commission, Long Exposure, at the 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Following her duet with Henry Birdsey on bagpipes over the summer, Warpeha returns to a solo format to investigate questions of stillness, suspension, and vulnerability in her performance practice.

Notes from Zosha Warpeha on Long Exposure: 

Over the last several months of conversing with the resonant space of the Boerum Pl. theater, I have felt surges of power in my playing, the impulse to throw my voice into the room, the collective creation of saturated drones and impenetrable walls of sound. But a space like this also brings awareness to a sense of smallness and fragility; the transparency of a bow stroke, the tension of a single hair pulled to its breaking point. I remind myself that power and strength manifests in different ways; even the faintest flicker of light in a dark room grows stronger over time as our eyes adjust.

Zosha Warpeha is a Brooklyn-based composer-performer working in a meditative space at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions. Using bowed stringed instruments alongside her own voice, her long-form compositions explore transformations of time, tonality, and resonant space. She performs primarily on Hardanger d’amore, a sympathetic-stringed instrument closely related to the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. While her work is informed by the cyclical forms and physical momentum of Nordic folk music, her solo practice "subvert[s] tradition not as a political act, but as a point of departure" (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street). Her work has been supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.