M HKA Ensembles

Periodical

Collection: Courtesy of Rasheed Araeen.

Rasheed Araeen is considered one of the pioneers of conceptual and minimalist art in Great Britain. He began making conceptual and abstract art in Karachi, Pakistan, in the late 1950s, before moving to London in 1964 where he made some of the earliest minimalist sculptures to be seen in Britain.

Araeen became disillusioned with the artistic system, which he felt was exclusionary of practitioners of migrant, non-Western backgrounds. Despite making modernist art, artists of black and Asian heritage were typically framed in terms of ethnic identities. Awakening a radical political consciousness, he became an activist, challenging Eurocentric discourse around contemporary art. In the 1970s, Araeen aligned himself with radical black emancipation movements such as the British Black Panthers, as well as Artists for Democracy, and began to produce works in different media reflecting his political views. It also led him to found and edit the magazine Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture in the Third World in 1978, before establishing the journal Third Text in 1987, developing critical discourse on Euro-centricity and new globalised perspectives in art.