Rasheed Araeen

b. 1935, Pakistan

Rasheed Araeen (b. 1935, Karachi) is from Pakistan, but lives and works in London. He is an artist, writer and inventor (international patent 2002), and the founding editor of Third Text. He began his career in Pakistan in 1953, whilst also studying civil engineering. After establishing himself as an artist in Karachi, he moved to the UK in 1964; and soon after (1965) he produced sculpture, which was a pioneering work of minimalism (Tate, 2007).

In the 1960s and 1970s, he became active in groups supporting liberation struggles, democracy and human rights, which led him to writing Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto (1975-76), and to editing the journals Black Phoenix (1978-79), Third Text (1987-2011) and Third Text Asia (2008-09). In 1989, he curated the exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain at the Hayward Gallery.

Since 2015, he has been showing internationally; and his work is now in the major museums, including MoMa (NY), Pompidou Centre (Paris) and Tate (UK). A Retrospective of his work was held in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland, (2018), which then travelled to MOMCA, Geneva (Switzerland), The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Masco (Russia) and Baltic Gallery, Gateshead, UK.