Rasheed Araeen watches in Turbine Hall while children rearrange his design
Rebel artist, now 88, had to wait till his mid-70s for international recognition
It can’t often happen that an artist watches with pleasure while his work is dismantled by hordes of children who then form their own versions of what he or she has carefully designed as an ordered and meaningful display (below left).
That is what happened to Rasheed Araeen, a controversial veteran British artist of Pakistani origin, in the vast Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern last weekend. Age 88, Araeen told me he had never seen anything like it before, even though the minimalist display, Zero to Infinity, has been through many incarnations since he first created it in 1968.
We were watching from a gallery above the Turbine Hall floor. Araeen was visibly happy that the display of 400 brightly coloured lattice-construction cubes were giving so much constructive pleasure to more than 100 children (right) and a few adults – with more queuing to get access to the floor.
“I’ve done my job and now people can come and make their own work,” he had said at the launch a day earlier. So far more than 1,000 children have played with the display every day.
On a broader front, the display is especially significant because it brings focus to one of the most under-valued – and oldest – living artists from a South Asian background. Born in Karachi, Araeen has been politically controversial for most of his artistic life, which has not endeared him to many private collectors.
His works have tended to finish up more in public collections that realise his significance and feel they need to support ethnic minority artists, rather than on the walls of image-sensitive private buyers – his first private exhibition did not take place till he was 76 when it was staged at a London gallery run by New York-based Aicon that continues to handle his work.
Amazingly, only one of Araeen’s works has ever been auctioned, seemingly because there are not sufficient private owners to generate a secondary market. Small Blue, a 60×25.5×25.5cmpainted steel double cube fetched £18,900 as a charity item at Christie’s in London last October. (One of a series of five, it was donated by the artist and by London’s Grosvenor Gallery that has the rest of the series.)
It’s a long overdue tribute to Araeen that his display is in the iconic Turbine Hall. Tate Modern doesn’t often provide a major space for South Asian origin artists, though it seems to be becoming aware that it should do more for a region of some two million people with many internationally recognised figures. The last big event was a dramatic retrospective of a prominent gay Indian painter, Bhupen Khakhar, in 2016.
An installation by India’s Vivan Sundaram is currently on show in one of its remote lower ground floor “tanks. Earlier there have been much smaller Araeen displays, including one in the tanks in 2016, though for many years the Tate resisted his approaches.
But even the Turbine Hall event is more serendipity than planned targeting. On a train to Hastings before the pandemic, Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director of programmes, met Janet Hodgson whose husband, Peter Fillingham, has been making Araeen’s sculptures in Hastings for over ten years. They started chatting and Wood remembered that she had admired Araeen’s work at Aicon’s London gallery in 2011. That chance meeting gradually led to what is now in the Turbine Hall.
Photographs, acrylic paint on plywood panels 72 x 78 in shown in the Grosvenor Gallery’s “63 Years of the Figural” exhibition earlier this month
Araeen is a sculptor, painter, and an installation and video artist. He has also been a political activist and editor. He initially trained as a civil engineer in Pakistan, a background that feeds into his structural displays. In 1964 he moved to London and, discovering the work of the British sculptor Anthony Caro, decided to devote himself full-time to similar work but with symmetrical configurations.
Prajit Dutta of the Aicon gallery says his “pioneering role in minimalist sculpture, represented (in the late 1960s) what was arguably then the only minimalism in Britain.”
When Araeen arrived, he discovered that “racism was everywhere”, including the art world where he and other artists were being turned away by UK galleries. That led him in the mid-1970s to produce a series of political videos and performances, and he became the editor of a campaigning magazine, the Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture magazine. In the mid-1970s, he wrote a long essay that he called ‘Preliminary Notes for a BLACK MANIFESTO’ for the Black Phoenix, as an attack on imperialism and its perpetuation of “international domination”.
Perhaps his most controversial work – which did not endear him to any establishment – was Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person). Comprising 40 projected images/slides and sound, he produced it in 1977 for an exhibition staged by Artists for Democracy. The Grosvenor, which staged two retrospective exhibitions in London earlier this month of Araeen’s paintings and other works from 1960 to 2023 (priced from £25,000 to £500,00), calls it ” the best known of Araeen’s heavily political pieces” (it has a copy for sale at an undisclosed price).
Paki Bastard consists of a montage of images of Asian immigrants in the east end of London’s famous Brick Lane, mixed with press cuttings on race-related attacks and images of Araeen’s family and his minimalist structures. The soundtrack includes Handel’s Messiah, music from Bollywood films and racist chants by members of the extreme right-wing National Front.
A breakthrough came in 1989 when London’s Hayward Gallery agreed to show The Other Story, which Araeen curated with an artist friend, Mahmood Jamal. They displayed works by “Asian, African and Caribbean artists living in post war Britain”, most of whom had not been sufficiently recognised.
The art is not overtly religious, though religion features heavily. Araeen sees a link between his geometric abstractionism and Islamic art that he explores in Islam and Modernism, a book published last year by the Grosvenor Gallery. Islamic art, he says, “is a prime example of this geometric-based art which existed centuries before the movement in Europe and in many ways influenced the Western School”.
Zero to Infinity is on at the Tate till August 28, timed for the school holidays It’s part of what’s called the Uniqlo-sponsored Tate Play that was launched in 2021. From August 12, there will be an outside installation, Shamiyaana IV (Food for Thought: Thought for Change), comprising four colourful gazebos with tables and chairs for people to sit, eat and talk.
Meanwhile Fillingham is at the Tate mending cubes that children have broken and devising ways to make them stronger
In conversation, Rasheed frequently refers to his lack of recognition and acceptability down the years, though that is changing. In the past decade, he has had retrospectives in cities ranging from Lima, San Paolo and Sharjah to Venice, Geneva and Moscow. And he will surely always remember sitting in the Turbine Hall gallery last Saturday (below) watching the children play with his creation.
Riding the Elephant 
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