Asad Raza (born in Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Diversion, first shown at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverted a river through the gallery. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), later 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 the feature Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2019). Other projects take intimate settings: The Bedroom at the 2018 Lahore Biennale; Home Show (2015) at his apartment in New York, where Raza asked artists to intervene in his life; and Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures, featuring participatory works and Shaker dance. 

With Hans Ulrich Obrist, Raza curates exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels), Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, New York), Where the Oceans Meet (MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami), and This language which is every stone (IMA, Brisbane). Raza will serve as Artistic Director of the upcoming FRONT 2025: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art. Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU.

Still from Ge, Asad Raza, 2020. Commissioned for The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory, Serpentine Galleries.

Ge, Asad Raza, 2020. Commissioned for The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory, Serpentine Galleries.

Asad Raza, Untitled (plot for dialogue), 2017, CONVERSO, Milan Photo Credit: Andrea Rossetti