Asad Raza (artist)

In March 2020, Raza began a collaborative project known as Home Cooking, a digital artist-run space with collaborators Marianna Simnett, Dora Budor, Prem Krishnamurthy, Precious Okoyomon. Presenting works, conversations and interviews, Home Cooking was a way of presenting new work within a coronavirus reality.

In 2019 Raza created the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney, Australia. His work, entitled Absorption, entailed the creation of 300 tonnes of "neo-soil" made from waste products and other materials found in Sydney. This filled an entire building at the Carriageworks art institution, and was given away to visitors. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the work "dramatises the differences between art and science, but it also shows us what they have in common...Artists, like scientists, are constantly pushing back the frontiers of the thinkable. By creating a work from soil, Raza is making a clear statement of ecological intent."

Minor History is a portrait in film of Wahid Mohammed, Asad Raza’s 90 year-old uncle who lives in Buffalo, New York. The film premiered on January 27, 2019 at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Raza’s works often respond to a particular environment in a site-specific manner. For example, in Root sequence. Mother tongue, created for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, trees in boxes were brought into the museum. Another example of this is his piece Untitled (plot for dialogue). Here, Raza installed a tennis court inside the 16th century church of San Paolo Converso in Milan.

Created for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Root sequence. Mother tongue was an composed of "26 young, often flowering trees facing the flickering light of the city", human caretakers, and objects belonging to the caretakers, as well as a scent created by Raza’s sister, the perfumer and artist Alia Raza. The piece ran for 4 months, and included a curatorial element, the Weekend Guests series, in which Raza invited choreographers, musicians, poets and scholars to conduct events inside the installation, including Manthia Diawara, Moriah Evans, Dan Graham, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Andros Zins-Browne, and others. The piece was shown for a second time at the Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, in September–October 2017.

Asked to create a show for CONVERSO, Raza "installed a clay tennis court in a desacralised 16th-century church in Milan" complete with flooring, lines, netting, racquets, iced jasmine tea, scent and coaches for a tennis-like game. The piece was described as "plac[ing] the experience of play above the purely visual appreciation, as the back-and-forth of tennis exchanges produces meditative beauty through actions never to be repeated."

From 2016-2017, Raza served as the artistic director for the Villa Empain, Brussels. There he co-curated the shows Mondialité with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Décor with Dorothea von Hantelmann and Tino Sehgal, Répétition with Nicola Lees, and Seeing Zen with Felix Hess and John Stevens.

Raza’s project animated the streetlights running up a hillside promenade in Ljublana’s, playing a visual song visible from many parts of the city. Coming on with the streetlights at dusk and running until dawn, the piece lasted the duration of the 2015 Graphic Art Biennial, turning the cityscape into an animated graphic artwork. Raza says he was influences by blinking lights visible across the Bosphorus in Istanbul.

For the 2013 Manchester International Festival, Alex Poots, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Raza, and Sehgal programmed this exhibition in the disused Manchester train depot, which was a museum of dance and live art projects.

From 2010-2015, Raza collaborated frequently with Tino Sehgal, serving as the producer for Sehgal’s major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His closest collaborations with Sehgal came in 2011-12, with the works Ann Lee first shown at the Manchester International and These associations, which Raza and Sehgal developed in London and Manchester over two years. According to the Guardian, "[s]everal hundred participants" were involved in the project at the Tate, "recruited through networks of friends and acquaintances, and rehearsed by Sehgal and his producer, Asad Raza." In 2014, Raza produced and directed These associations at CCBB, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In 2014 Raza also realized a long-term project of bring Sehgal’s works to the ancient center of Athens, Greece, with the NEON foundation, stating "When I visited the ancient sites of Athens, where commercial, cultural, social and philosophical exchange took place, where knowledge passed through and was transferred between bodies, I had the distinct feeling that the embodied and dialogical elements in Sehgal’s work would have a special resonance here.”

Asad Raza was born in 1974 in Buffalo, New York to Pakistani immigrant parents, and studied literature at Johns Hopkins University from 1992-1996 and filmmaking at the Tisch School of Arts in 1993. He also studied literature at NYU, where he helped organize the 2005 graduate student strike. From 2005-2010, Raza wrote frequently about tennis for various magazines and newspapers.

Schema for a school takes the form of "an experimental school" that considered new models for teaching and learning, through a series of relevant thoughts and actions drawn from sociology, philosophy, cooking, choreography, literature, and other forms of awareness. Raza was influenced by Dan Graham’s Schema (1966), a work that describes its own attributes according to strict rules every time it is reproduced. Schema is an adaptive protocol, a responsive script, and its form is a model for the pedagogical schemata the school will use. The school first took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2015, with further iterations at the Villa Empain in Brussels and Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2016, and it is next scheduled for New York’s The Shed in 2018.