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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, diverts a river through the gallery space. 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 film Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.  Raza's most recent site-specific commissions, Prehension and Komorebi, were shown at Manifesta 15 Barcelona (2024) and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2023).

Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom, at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For The home show (2015), which took place at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists 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-Fondation Boghossian, Brussels, 2016-2017. From 2017-2022, Raza co-curated a series of exhibitions with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 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's collaborative practice includes serving as a dramaturge for group exhibitions such as 2014’s A stroll through a fun palace in the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Solaris Chronicles for LUMA Arles, as well as multiple exhibitions by the artist Philippe Parreno. From 2009-2013, he served as the producer for Tino Sehgal’s exhibitions, including shows at the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern and the Roman Agora of Athens, Greece. From 2003-2007, he was active as a political activist, teacher and organizer in New York. Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and New York University, where he helped organize a labor strike in 2006. He has written for Jan Mot Newspaper, Kaleidoscope, Frieze, Mousse, n+1, NERO, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Spike, and TENNIS magazine.

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