Asad Raza’s practice takes the form of installations, films, publications, and long-term collaborative projects that engage ecological systems, collective processes, and embodied experience. His work often unfolds through participation, care, and the redistribution of agency, foregrounding relationships between humans and more-than-human environments.

Raza’s projects frequently work with elemental materials—soil, wind, water, light, plants—and with the social and scientific knowledge embedded in them. Rather than producing discrete objects, he develops situations that evolve over time and require cultivation, hosting, and maintenance. In these works, the artist functions as a director or convener, bringing together collaborators such as scientists, musicians, gardeners, writers, custodians, and local communities. This expanded approach proposes art as a site of shared responsibility and ecological attention.

Major projects include Absorption (2019–), an ongoing work involving the collective production and redistribution of fertile soil; Diversion (2022), which redirected a river through an exhibition space and invited visitors to drink its filtered water; Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), where visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church; Root sequence. Mother tongue (2017–), an inhabited forest installation structured around care and narration; and Prehension(2024), which gave form to the wind through suspended textiles activated by atmospheric forces. Recent commissions include Immortal Coil (2025), developed with High Line Art and Frieze New York, and Intermedio (2025–26), a living installation integrating soil and plants into Azotea ARS, Buenos Aires.

Raza’s work has been presented internationally by the Mori Art Museum, the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Gropius Bau, Serpentine Galleries, Guggenheim Bilbao, Kunsthalle Portikus, Kaldor Public Art Projects, and Manifesta 15. His films have screened at international festivals, and his writing and editorial projects explore alternative pedagogical and ecological frameworks. Raza was born to Pakistani parents in Buffalo, New York.

Photo credit: Alex de Brabant