Buffalo-born New York artist Asad Raza has been named curator of the 2025 edition of the Cleveland Front International Triennial, art news reports. Raza, whose collaborative practice resists easy categorization, will work alongside Magdalena Moskalewicz, the event’s permanent chief curator. Although no theme has yet been announced for the triennial, Raza said he plans to focus on Cleveland and the surrounding area, rather than bringing in big-name international artists, as is the norm during such events since the turn of the millennium.
“We are at a different time, historically and economically,” he said in an interview. “We can’t just repeat the pattern.” Citing “Cleveland residents who may not even know they care about contemporary art” as the event’s target audience and promising a triennial that engages with local communities, he said: “I can help shine a light on a certain type of work that I see happening more and more, and that’s a good thing. Raza continued, “’Site-specific’ is almost wrong, almost location-specific. The difference between a site and a place is that a site is almost a geographical set of coordinates, whereas a place is inhabited by humans and non-humans.
Raza has also made place the subject of her own work, embracing practices as diverse as performance, music, science and sculpture, with nature being a frequent theme. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, for example, he populated a gallery with a forest of trees planted in individual wooden boxes. For the 2022 Front Triennial, in which he participated, he led a group of musicians from Buffalo to Cleveland by boat, aboard which the congregation wrote a new song in the Seneca language. A 2022 show at the Portikus in Frankfurt found it channeling water from the city’s legendary River Main into the gallery, where visitors were invited to stand and drink it.
