Rasheed Araeen

Araeen was pursuing a career as an engineer in Karachi when he was first exposed to avant-garde art. This arrived through two channels: imported Western books and magazines and contact with Pakistani contemporary artists. Consequently, he decided to pursue art-making and embarked on a second career.[1]

Upon arriving in London in 1964, he began working as an artist without any formal training, producing sculptures influenced by Minimalism and the work of Anthony Caro alongside his engineering experience.[2][3] By his own account, works created or imagined in this period such as Chakras (1969-1970) and Zero to Infinity (1968-2004[4]), while using basic structural units such as cubes, lattice and discs, were process-based and open to transformation by "the creative energy of the collective".[2] Concepts of this period would make ripple effects throughout his career, both formally and politically. Chakras, the 16 red painted circular discs released on the water from Saint Katherine's Deck in 1970, would later evolve and give rise to the concept of Disco Sailing (1970–74), a new form between floating sculpture and dance. The work was revisited and resurrected many times through the decades and performed most recently at Garage Museum in Moscow in 2019.[5]

Starting from the 1970s Araeen was increasingly concerned with questions of Postcolonialism as he struggled with the Eurocentrism of institutions.[6] Centering around issues of identity, representation and racial violence, he created the performance Paki Bastard, Portrait of The Artist as a Black Person (1977) using video projection, live performance and sound.[7] He complemented this with writing statements and manifestos, which he considered to be a "textual form of art".[8]

He also often traveled back to Karachi and make frequent visits to Baluchistan as a "return to the source". These travels have prompted in interest around land art and environmental issues described as "Ecoaesthetics" in his 2010 publication Art Beyon Art.[2]

Araeen participated in Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989); 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998), 9th Shanghai Biennale (212), 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012),[9] 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and documenta 14 (2017).[10] In December 2017 a major retrospective of Araeen's work which spotted 60 years of his work was presented at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and then toured to MAMCO in Geneva, the BALTIC in Gateshead, and Garage Museum in Moscow.[11]

Araeen's artistic activity has been complemented by writing and publishing. He founded and began editing the journal Black Phoenix in 1978, which came to an abrupt end after three issues. In 1987 he founded the groundbreaking journal Third Text. Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, dealing with art, the Third World, Postcolonialism and ethnicity. In the first decade of its publication, the main aim was to reveal "the institutional closures of the art world and the artists they included, the second began the inquiry into the emergent phenomenon first signaled by the notorious show Magiciens de la terre of the assimilation of the exotic other into the new world art," as Sean Cubitt summarized the goals in the Third Text Reader in 2002.[12] In 1999 Araeen spoke about his own journal Third Text as an attempt to "demolish the boundaries that separate art and art criticism".[13]

Some of Araeen's contributions to Third Text were "From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts / & / Why Third Text?", Third Text #1, Autumn 1987;[14] "Our Bauhaus Others' Mudhouse" [the Magiciens de la terre issue], Third Text #6, Spring 1989[15] and "Modernity, Modernism and Africa's Authentic Voice", Third Text Vol 24 #2, 2010.[16]

Araeen founded Third Text Asia in 2008. The journal published three issues before ceasing activity.[17]

Araeen has been among the first cultural practitioners to voice since the early 1970s the need of artists of African, Latin American and Asian origins to be represented in British cultural institutions. His approach allowed him to shape his ideas through a number of different media: he curated exhibitions; initiated and published a number of journals, produced art installations and community-based artistic projects.

Prior to founding the journal Black Phoenix, in 1972, he joined the Black Panther Movement and wrote "Preliminary Notes For A Black Manifesto" in 1975–76.[8] In the years that followed, he became an important figure in establishing a black voice in the British arts through his activities as a publisher, writer, and artist. In 1988 he curated the exhibition The Essential Black Art.[18] This provided a foretaste of The Other Story, a larger 1989 exhibition featuring artists including Araeen himself, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Uzo Egonu, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Donald Locke, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Ahmed Parvez, Ivan Peries, Keith Piper, F. N. Souza and Aubrey Williams. A groundbreaking exhibition of British African, Caribbean and Asian modernism, The Other Story was mounted at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, and went on to Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Manchester City Art Gallery and Cornerhouse.[19]

In 2001 he was invited by the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria to publish his institutional critique of the present art museum in the publication The Museum as Arena.[20] Araeen published the outcome of his private correspondence with the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, which had asked him to join an exhibition in 1980 (also published in Rasheed Araeen, Making Myself Visible).[6] His proposal was declined when the other ten artists refused to show their work alongside his. Their opposition not only manifested cultural conflicts, but was also meant to defend the purity of the gallery space where Araeen had proposed to perform the slaughter and consumption of a goat (according to a Muslim ritual). Along with the actual performance, he had announced that he would display and tear up "the pages of a contemporary art history book".[20] Thus, the action directed against the exclusionary aesthetics of the art gallery was complemented with a rejection of the official story of modernist art and avant-garde history.

In 2019 he opened Shamiyaana, a restaurant/space where people can enjoy simple, vibrant, nourishing, low-cost food in an environment purpose-designed for conversation and eating.

• Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984)
• From Modernism to Postmodernism: Rasheed Araeen: a Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, essays by P. Bickers, J. Roberts, and D. Phillipi (Birmingham: Ikon Gal., 1987)
• From Two Worlds (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1986)
• Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994)
• Rasheed Araeen, exhibition catalogue, essay by P. Overy (London: S. London A. G., 1994)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rasheed Araeen.

• Third Text Online
• Tate Gallery Web Site
• "From Innovation to Deconstruction: My Own Story".
• Work's list of Araeen

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