Rasheed Araeen: A British Story

18 Oct 2024-2 Feb 2025

Rasheed Araeen, Rasheed's Portrait, 2017

Overview

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). 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.

Rasheed Araeen: 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 - to be announced in due course.

Artists