FRONT International Announces Key Artistic Leadership in Advance of its 2025 Exhibition

Continuing FRONT’s position as an artist-led triennial, Raza will follow in the footsteps of artist and educator Michelle Grabner of FRONT 2018 and designer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy of FRONT 2022 to steward the creative program of the upcoming edition, shaping its conceptual framework and inviting artists from around the world to participate in the expansive, season-long exhibition that takes place in major arts and educational institutions across Northeast Ohio. Assuming a newly founded position of Chief Curator, Magdalena Moskalewicz will develop and advocate for the artistic voice and curatorial standards of FRONT in all its programs, publications, and exhibitions. She will collaborate closely with Raza and FRONT’s institutional partners to elevate FRONT as an institution and internationally-regarded exhibition.

Raza’s appointment to this leadership role deepens his creative partnership with the organization and the city of Cleveland. His twin commissions for FRONT 2022 exemplify his practice of creating site-specific ecologies of experience and will reflect his curatorial approach to FRONT 2025. For Delegation, Raza and seven musicians sailed across Lake Erie from Buffalo to Cleveland, composing a piece of music they then performed at Cleveland's Old Stone Church. His public sculpture Orientation, at once an astronomical device and a children's slide, was constructed from invasive mussel shells. Both works delved into Lake Erie’s past, present, and futures—its entwined rhythms, eco-systems, and communities—through an engagement with the local geography, systems, and peoples.

In much the same way that Raza conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience, so too does he conceive of exhibitions. Such an ecological approach will be similarly applied to FRONT 2025, as it has been throughout his past experience organizing exhibitions across the globe in the roles of both artist and curator—exemplified by artworks that involved diverting a river through the Kunsthalle Portikus (Diversion, 2022), filling a museum with artificial soil (Absorption, 2019), installing an active tennis court in a Milanese church in (Untitled (Plot for Dialogue), 2017), growing trees in a museum (Root sequence. Mother tongue, Whitney Biennial, 2017), or bringing an archive alive (A stroll through a fun palace, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014).

Image : Left: Asad Raza. Photo credit: Alex de Brabant. | Right: Magdalena Moskalewicz. Photo credit: Stacey Rupolo.