Asad Raza

Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, caretakers and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Raza premiered Minor History, a dialogue with his 91 year old uncle, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.

Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom, at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), which took place at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists and friends to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. Raza was artistic director of the Villa Empain in Brussels in 2016-7. With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité, Trembling Thinking at the Americas Society in New York and Where the Oceans Meet at MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami. Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organize a labor strike.