Rasheed Araeen
For six decades the Pakistani-born, London-based artist, writer, and educator Rasheed Araeen has been at the vanguard of art and activism in the UK. In 1964, on first moving to London following training as a civil engineer in Karachi, Araeen quickly established himself as one of the pioneers of British minimalist sculpture, creating colourful, tessellating structures like the iconic, interactive Zero to Infinity (devised in 1968), which occupied Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last summer. Beginning in the 1970s, however, his keen awareness of racial inequality within the art world led him towards post- colonial politics. This shift was not conceived as a separate project: form followed function, and his growing political activism became inseparable from his modernist aesthetic. Many of his abstract geometric compositions are symbolically suggestive of egalitarian systems of production and relations, while his more overtly political works probe his own personal responses to events in Britain – to the successes and failures of multiculturalism – as well as his profound historical interest in Islamic art.
In 1989 Araeen curated the exhibition The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in London. As the first major retrospective of work by artists of Asian, Caribbean and African ancestry in Britain, this landmark initiative is still celebrated today for its role in disrupting the Euro-American modernist canon, and for the part it played in securing recognition for some of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists. As Araeen wrote in his catalogue essay, “This is a unique story. It is a story that has never been told.”
Within the intimate setting of The Heong Gallery, A British Story condenses Araeen’s artistic career into a representative selection of work across painting, collage, sculpture, and participatory installations. Works include Zero to Infinity, and his ‘Reading Room’ installation, which will offer visitors the opportunity to engage with the artist’s own writings, many of which were first published in the journal Third Text, which he founded in 1987. The show emphasizes the indivisibility of Araeen’s formal artistic language from his post-colonial political awareness and highlights his imaginative artistic responses to British political and cultural life over the last fifty years.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of talks and events, including a Symposium that bring together academics, writers and artists involved in The Other Story.
Born and educated in Pakistan, Araeen trained as an engineer before moving to Europe in the 1960s. Through his activities as a publisher, writer, and artist he is one of the pivotal figures in establishing a black voice in the British arts. Araeen has published numerous journals and articles, some of the most notable being Black Phoenix, published in 1978, followed by the hugely influential Third Text in 1987 and Third Text Asia in 2008. He also founded Kala Press in association with Third Text to disseminate information on neglected African and Asian artists in Britain who contributed to the development of post-war British art.
Rasheed has exhibited widely, with recent exhibitions including Rasheed Araeen: Conscious Forms at RWA Bristol (2024), Zero to Infinity, UNIQLO Tate Play, Tate Modern (2023), Rasheed Araeen: Islam and Modernism, Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2022), and Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2018) which later travelled to MAMCO, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2018), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2018–19) and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2019). His works have been included in important private and public collections across the world, namely The Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; amongst others.
Rasheed lives and works in London, United Kingdom.