Asad Raza is an American artist who lives and works in New York, NY. Life and education 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. Work Asad Raza's practices encompass artistic projects, collaborations, curatorial work and his work, and he is described as "one of the most interesting crossroads figures in our sometimes rigid panorama." 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. Selected projects Absorption 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." Untitled (plot for dialogue) 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." Root sequence. Mother tongue 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