Rasheed Araeen Research Articles

Encountering alterity: linguistic opacity in modern and contemporary art

This study considers artworks from across the modern and contemporary period (with a focus on the 1940s onwards) where writing is presented as incomprehensible to the viewer. This can occur, for instance, where issues related to cross-cultural interaction are being addressed, or more generally where the issue of encounter with an otherness of some kind has become the content of the work. While the earlier part of the analysis will focus primarily on artists of European or North American origin, artists of non-Western birth will predominate in the discussion of more recent art. Amongst the artists discussed are Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, Lee Krasner, Zhao Wuji, Cy Twombly, Rasheed Araeen, Xu Bing, Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, and Warren Leung Chi Wo. Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese written language, and Arabic calligraphy are linguistic codes to which the article will also refer.

Revisiting Rasheed Araeen's Structures: 8bS at Manufactured Art, 1970

Abstract In May 1970, Rasheed Araeen's work “8bS” appeared in Manufactured Art, a group exhibition dedicated to artistic engagements with industrial processes and advanced technology. Araeen's contribution, like many of his 1960–70s works, comprised lattice-like structures that engaged forms and techniques common to his professional training as a civil engineer. Like the Minimalist object, “8bS” deployed the grammar of productive techniques to structure artistic form, breaking with the compositional principles of formalist modernism and moving towards art beyond objecthood. Yet Araeen's contribution to Manufactured Art suggests that Araeen's structures also avoided the limitations of the Minimalist object's negative mimesis of technological infrastructure, while anticipating subsequent manoeuvres by artists such as Robert Morris. Revisiting Araeen's structures in Manufactured Art reinforces the singular importance of Araeen's structuralist modality, while provincializing US Minimalism as one of multiple trajectories working out of the stasis of modernist objecthood.

Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah

Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah is noteworthy as the first work by the Karachi-born, London-based artist to enter the collection of Britain’s Tate Gallery in 1995. Bismullah deploys strategies of juxtaposition, disjunction, and doubling to combine visual imagery that references religion, empire, art history, and the artist’s personal biography. Through its montage tactics Bismullah not only maps the binaries of self and other that structure colonial discourse within and beyond the artistic field, but also recontextualizes these signifiers.

The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain

This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post‐imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested beholder, and universalist claims of timeless aesthetic value – the second wave (including Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes) turned to minimalism, performance, and photo‐text to de‐centre modernism's core assumptions that relied on formalist discourse. Collage and montage practices among the UK‐born third wave (including Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, and Donald Rodney), which entailed the hyphenation of cross‐cultural elements, thus call for a deeper look at transculturation processes active since modernism's beginning, but which were not previously recognized on account of formalist hegemony.

Black Sheep: Rasheed Araeen, David Medalla, and Reconfigurations of Visibility in the 1970s

Black, Asian, and minority ethnic artists have figured as at once seemingly absent but also actively resistant to ideological capture by historically white institutions. In terms of performance in ...

Where's the "Public" in Public Art. Three Narratives from documenta 14

This paper analyses five public art projects exhibited in documenta 14 in Athens in 2017 that redefine and interact with the public space and therefore, form three different narratives on public space. These narratives are outlined according to the different interpretations of ‘public space’, ‘public sphere’ and democracy by the various artists. Our argument is structured as follows; firstly, we present an analysis of public art and its basic features drawing from contemporary literature. Secondly, we provide a number of key facts regarding documenta and documenta 14, outlining the main reasons we selected it as a reference point. Thirdly, we describe the three narratives about public space that we came up with after our field research and interviews with the respective artists: Sanja Iveković, Joar Nango, Rasheed Araeen, Mattin and Rick Lowe. We then discuss the relations between them and develop a model that unravels the way artists explore the public domain, look for locations, and redefine public space and the lived experience in the city. To do so, we engage with theoretical approaches as well as elaborations on specific artworks that engage the shifts and changes of the lived urban experience through art.

Decentring the Genealogies of Art Activism

The main objective of this article is to call into question the critical purchase and universal validity of the vocabulary used in discussions on art activism. Through an examination of what Charles Mills calls ‘Ideal Theory’, I argue that a new lexicon for socially transformative creativity is all the more urgent. Such a new lexicon would help in articulating alternative genealogies and histories of radical aesthetics. The task of provincialising and historicising the genealogies of art arises as a crucial tool to challenge the increasing specialisation and institutionalisation of socially transformative creative practices. This article identifies in Rasheed Araeen’s conceptualisation of collaborative aesthetic as a strategic task a valuable alternative to this normalised use of a lexicon for art activism.

New Directions in Black British Art History

This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen’s 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists’ work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a “rescuing from obscurity” of important pioneering texts on black British artists.

Self-Portraiture and Representations of Blackness in the Work of Donald Rodney

This article considers the role of self-portraiture within the work of British artist Donald Rodney (1961–98). The text investigates the ways in which Rodney used the self-portrait, not to visualize himself, but to animate issues associated with the dominant framings of black men as delinquent, sexually deviant, and a menace to society. The work of Rasheed Araeen is discussed, with particular relevance to his influential use of self-portraiture. The author also discusses mainstream media’s construction of the black male deviant with respect to aspects of the newspaper coverage of the “rioting” that took place in Rodney’s home town, Birmingham, in the mid-1980s.

Making Waves

This article proposes a rereading of the timeline of the British Black Arts Movement, and offers early work by the Pakistan-born British artist, writer, and editor Rasheed Araeen as possible starting points for reading the work of a new generation of artists who emerged in the early 1980s. Making Waves draws attention to a work by Araeen, For Oluwale, which commemorated the racist killing by police officers of David Oluwale, a Nigerian vagrant persecuted in Leeds, England, during the mid-1960s, leading to his death in 1969. While proposing a radical new timeline, the article also concedes that “beginnings are notoriously unstable things.”

In Conversation with Rasheed Araeen

Rasheed Araeen discusses the development of his artistic practice and the matrix of modernism and imperialism.

Words Toting Their Contexts: Rasheed Araeen’s Criticism of Racial Relations Bureaucracy

Nizan Shaked describes Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking interventions into an artistic system based on exclusion.

Action as Modernist Code

ACTION AS MODERNIST CODE Modernism and the Art of South by Iftikhar Dadi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 312. $41.95 cloth.In the late 1990s, I was in Lahore, conducting doctoral research and befriending the artists and scholars associated with the National College of Arts (NCA). Of these, Rashid Rana, at that time a teacher at the NCA and very much a rising artist, was my favorite for the easy affection he showed me, a newcomer to Lahore. Later when he became famous and I started seeing his artwork splashily displayed, I was proud. At the same time, I wondered whether his rise in the international markets did not coincide a little too neatly with the downward trajectory of the nation of his birth, Pakistan, into political chaos in the 2000s, as if it amused art connoisseurs that a country so bungling in statecraft should produce such fine art. I wondered whether Rashid did not pander a bit to the widespread representation of Pakistan as an extremist religious stronghold, if only to shock, for instance with his image of the veiled woman who dissolved into thousands of images of naked, strutting playgirls upon closer look.Banish such cynical thoughts, urges Iftikhar Dadi in his cogently written and lushly illustrated 2010 book Modernism and the Art of South Dadi, an art historian at Cornell University and a respected artist in his own right, contends that if we are to have a proper appreciation and a pleasurable encounter with some of the most serious art entering the world's scene, we must step away from such easy criticism and grapple with the difficulties of the emergence of modernism as a movement within the art of what he calls Muslim South Asia. As an aside, Muslim South Asia is a formulation worth unpacking. Presumably, Dadi uses it to bring colonial India and pre-independence Bangladesh within the purview of artistic inheritance and production in Pakistan, without having to delve too much into the histories of art in those two nations. I understand this formulation as allowing art in Pakistan to be grounded in its own terms and not in a derivative or defensive posture to the nations in the region with which it has shared and conflicted histories. It is a bold and perhaps founding move on Dadi's part to suggest that in attending to the art that Pakistan feels to be its own, we also attend significantly to the art of the Muslims of South Asia.That artists of the region have had to contend with postcolonial anxieties about the originality of their contribution to modernism, and the politics of influence is the assumed background to this work. Dadi presents this dilemma succinctly in his introduction to the book. The plight of artists is further complicated because they stand in a problematic relationship to an aesthetic tradition established as Islamic art by Western scholarship. The problem is simultaneously one of determining how to lay claims upon this tradition while critically perceiving and representing the structures of mediation, and one of securing the artist as an independent subject as opposed to a master plier of the tradition. Besides such questions of the positioning of the artistic self and its sovereignty, there is the further conundrum of the artist's target audience - that is, whether it is the nation, the people, or an emergent cosmopolitanism.Disclaiming any attempts at representativeness, Dadi takes up a handful of artists - Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Zainul Abedin, Zubeida Agha, Shakir Ali, Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen, Naiza Khan and those around them - giving them four meaty chapters in more or less chronological order to work through the range of possibilities, limitations, contradictions, ambivalences, and transcendences within the afore-sketched terrain of dilemmas facing the modern artist. Blending biographical sketches, vignettes that illuminate a particular path taken, historical contextualization, description of specific milieus, focused attention to formal elements within individual works, and engagement with wider theoretical and political concerns, Dadi masterfully presents less the profiles of artistic subjectivities and more a series of actions, productive and proliferating, converging and differentiating, that run through and constitute the current generative code of Pakistani art. …

Globalization and contemporary art

Globalization and Contemporary Art is an unprecedented collection of essays that charts the intersection of and globalization since the 1980s. The volume provides an authoritative, accessible, comprehensive, and challenging account of the impact of globalization upon contemporary visual and its socio–cultural spheres of production, circulation, and consumption. Richly illustrated, this anthology showcases 33 essays from all corners of the world by well–known authors such as W.J.T. Mitchell, Rasheed Araeen, and James Elkins, as well as emerging scholars in history/theory, visual and museum studies. The collection is deliberately wide–ranging, embracing the subject in all its fullness, diversity and unruliness – from case–studies of artists and artworks to meditations on broader thematic, conceptual, and historiographical topics. Tackling the subject through a variety of useful analytics – forms and formations, institutions, the production of meaning, identifications, and reproduction – Globalization and Contemporary Art challenges the status of history as the dominant discipline able to recognize and account for developments in visual and art worlds since the 1980s. Collectively, this set of essays suggests how and why such a necessary re–conceptualization should take place and with what consequences. This is illuminating reading for all students and scholars of history, visual culture, cultural studies, cultural policy and globalization studies.

Rasheed Araeen, Live Art, and Radical Politics in Britain

Rasheed Araeen, Live Art, and Radical Politics in Britain

Radical Cosmopolitanism

‘Art’ is a modern concept, limited in time and space. Its role has been taken over by the ‘artworld’, which thrives in our era of globalisation. Is YouTube today a more creative space than the artworld? Should we be concerned? Rasheed Araeen calls for a ‘true universalism’ to replace the fragmented orientations of creative work in the recent past. What would this mean as an alternative to the artworld? What strategy of creative work, in theory as well as art, could produce a social field that defies boundaries, real and imagined? What would a radical, cosmopolitan space look like that understood its task as refusing to align itself with a particular political position (even a ‘progressive’ position)?

To Be Real: Figuring Blackness in Modern and Contemporary African Diaspora Visual Cultures

This essay explores figuration in artistic- and museum-exhibiting practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that undermine the authority of authentic blackness as a primary tenet of African diasporic identification. It takes its cue from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall's keen assessment: “The fact is that `black' has never been just there. It has always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally, and politically.” The essay's first section is an analysis of art by Rasheed Araeen and Roshini Kempadoo created in the 1970s and 1990s, an era during which they and other progressives of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent in the United Kingdom claimed the political and cultural position “black.” The essay's second section considers the representation of blackness in three exhibitions from 1997 to 2007 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The essay's final section examines the cartoonlike paintings of the African American artists Laylah Ali and Kojo Griffin. Figuring is the conceptual thread uniting these African diasporic moments, which, though not causally related, similarly transgress against limiting definitions of blackness in order to privilege its productive, transforming visibilities.

Architecture-writing

Architecture-writing

The Failure of DAK'ART?

I read Rasheed Araeen's timely critique of DAK'ART: La Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain (Third Text 62), timely because, though someone ought to have undertaken such a rounded critique much ...

Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (review)

This substantial collection is divided into two sections: the first consists of eleven essays referring to the forty years following the arrival of the first boatload of Caribbean immigrants in 1948; the second consists of thirty-one essays and interviews almost entirely recorded in the 1990s. In Britain, the category "black" for reasons of political solidarity may include peoples whose ancestral origins are in the Indian subcontinent, and this is reflected in the inclusion of several Asian commentators, notably A. Sivanandan, editor of Race and Class, Rasheed Araeen, editor of Third Text, and Heidi Safia Mirza. However, by far the greater majority of the contributors are of African and African-Caribbean origin.