The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

37 ARTISTS Top: Chaar Yaar I (four friends) 1968/2014 Wood, house paint / Four pieces: 61 x 61 x 61cm (each) / Purchased 2017. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Below: Forever Green 1988 Five colour photographs, one watercolour with Urdu text and four plywood panels with Astroturf / 204 x 283.5cm / Courtesy: The artist and Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong | London Born 1935, Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in London, United Kingdom Rasheed Araeen has been making art for more than 60 years. It has led him on concurrent and prolific creative paths — one of continuous formal and conceptual investigation as a visual artist, and as a writer, theorist and activist, challenging the art system and its political underpinnings, ultimately questioning how art is seen. Soon after his arrival in London in 1964, Araeen created pioneering works of Minimalism, building on experiments he had developed in Karachi in the years prior. Early works like Chaar Yaar I (four friends) 1968 were created from DIY products, such as balsa wood and house paint, but, lacking exhibition opportunities, they were often documented and quickly deconstructed. Their homemade materiality and focus on modularity and interactivity distinguished them from the hard-edged, static Minimalism of the time. Araeen approached works of art not as finished objects, but as a collective process. He developed sculptures and proposals for modular structures that could be continually rearranged by participants to create a plurality of formal relationships. Although Araeen endlessly created and experimented after moving to London, he also became aware that he — like many others of non-Western heritage — would never be accepted into the art canon. Since the 1970s, Araeen has been relentless in challenging the Eurocentric hegemonies operating in the art world and further afield. He has confronted the art establishment through decades of writing, publishing and activism, contesting the imperialist lexicon of Western Modernism and drawing attention to unacknowledged art histories. He staged performances and conceptual works, and aligned himself with artist collectives and activist groups, such as Artists for Democracy and the British Black Panthers. 1 As part of a prolific writing and publishing career, he founded the Black Phoenix journal in 1978, which, in 1987, developed into the influential Third Text . 2 In 1989, Araeen curated ‘The Other Story’ at London’s Hayward Gallery, a groundbreaking exhibition that was the first platform specifically for artists of Asian, African and Caribbean descent. ‘The Other Story’ was staged partly in response to Jean-Hubert Martin’s ‘Magiciens de la terre’, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, the same year, an exhibition in which Araeen featured, but which he criticised for ignoring and undermining issues of historical and epistemological significance. 3 From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Araeen’s work became a confluence of earlier formal concerns and politically charged gestures. His series of nine-panel ‘cruciform’ collages embedded a range of symbols that appropriated references to Western imperialism and colonialism in conversation with Islamic art and images of conflict. Arranged with minimalist symmetry, they juxtaposed images of the United States Armed Forces in the Middle East and icons of Western popular culture alongside the artist’s early paintings, photographs, Urdu texts and fields of green — the colour of Islam and the Pakistani flag. They captured some of the polarising cultural tensions of the time, showing a divided world where the centre and periphery were ‘tied together in a violent nexus’. 4 During the last decade, Araeen has remained rigorous in his formalist inquiries, creating vivid paintings that combine Islamic calligraphy and vibrant abstraction, recalling the expressive energy of the abstract drawings he created in Karachi in the 1950s. More recently, the artist has created the ‘Opus series’, an ongoing experimentation with geometric arrangements and colour fields with their roots in the sculptures he was creating early in his career in London. Meanwhile, he has become an influential voice advocating for inclusiveness in contemporary culture, as well as addressing broader concerns of racism and postcolonial marginalisation. He reminds us that there are still many stories to tell, and many other voices to tell them. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Artists for Democracy was a collective led by Filipino artist David Medalla. Araeen performed at the opening of Artists for Democracy in 1974, and in 1977, staged a highly charged performance at the space titled Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) . 2 Third Text has been regularly published since 1987. In 2008, Araeen established the Karachi-based Third Text Asia . 3 Rasheed Araeen, 'Our Bauhaus others' mudhouse', Third Text , vol.3, no.6, spring 1989, p.4. 4 Quoted in Zöe Sutherland, ‘Dialectics of modernity and counter- modernity: Rasheed Araeen’s cruciform works’, in Nick Aikens (ed.), Rasheed Araeen , JRP-Ringier, Zurich, 2018, p.198. Rasheed araeen