Film Screening: Delegation + Ge

Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience.

Two of Raza\'s films will be screened at Hallwalls, including Delegation, which documents a sailboat journey from Buffalo to Cleveland on which music was composed by Raza and a group of Cleveland and Buffalo musicians (see below). The music was then performed at the 2022 Cleveland Front Triennial. This is the second screening at Hallwalls in a series that previously shared Delegation Glimpse, a hand-processed film by Andrea Mancuso of the same journey.

Musicians: Andrea Mancuso, LaToya Kent, RA Washington, Rafay Rashid, Shasti O\'Leary Soudant, and Ulysses Atwhen. Poster design by Julian Montague.

Diversion, first shown at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverts a river through the gallery space. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), later shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a 16-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, caretakers, and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial.

Raza premiered the feature film Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019. Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), at his apartment in NYC, Raza asked artists, friends, and family to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance.

With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels), Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, New York), Where the Oceans Meet (MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami), and This language which is every stone (IMA, Brisbane).

Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organize a labor strike. He is curator of the 2025 Front International Triennial in Cleveland.