He "creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active encounter that is participatory, and engages with all of the human senses.
"[1] 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.
[7] Raza’s installation for Manifesta 15 works with the removal of the Three Chimneys’ window panes, giving form to the wind Xaloc (Sirocco), which crosses the Mediterranean from the African continent.
[9] Writing in Artforum, Elise Shar stated that "[t]he redirected river provided a powerful antidote to conventional exhibition practice, giving rise to a display conceived as active and ever changing.
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.
[11]" Asked to create a show for CONVERSO, Raza "installed a clay tennis court in a desacralised 16th-century church in Milan"[12] complete with flooring, lines, netting, racquets, iced jasmine tea, scent and coaches for a tennis-like game.
[13] 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.
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.
There he co-curated the shows Mondialité[permanent dead link] with Hans Ulrich Obrist,[30] Décor with Dorothea von Hantelmann and Tino Sehgal,[31] Répétition with Nicola Lees, and Seeing Zen with Felix Hess and John Stevens.
[38] 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.
[40] 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.”[41] Raza served as a dramaturge for several exhibitions with Philippe Parreno, including Park Avenue Armory, Rockbund Museum,[42] and Jumex Museum.