Asad Raza

New York-based artist and producer Asad Raza, in conversation with Artspace Deputy Director Michelle Newton, will explore exhibitions as a format of active experience rather than visual consumption. Raza will address how art experiences may be constructed outside of museums and galleries, and unpack the dialogical as both form and subject for artistic exploration.

Asad Raza (b. 1974, Buffalo, USA) combines experiences, human and non-human beings, and objects in his work, which explores how art inhabits space. Raza conceives of exhibitions as metabolic entities in which an active scenario must be constructed in which the work is located in an interchange between visitor and installation. For Untitled (plot for dialogue), he installed a tennis-like game in a church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, first shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is a forest of twenty-six living trees with human caretakers in the museum. For home show, which took place at his apartment in New York, Raza asked friends, family and artists to intervene in his own life. Raza also explored exhibition-making in a domestic house as artistic director of the Villa Empain in Brussels, where he co-curated the shows Mondialité, Decor, Répétition, and Seeing Zen. 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. Raza’s writing has appeared in Jan Mot Newspaper, n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Spike, and Tennis magazine. Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and New York University.