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Pakistani artist, , painter, writer and curator, active in England. He graduated in civil engineering from the University of Karachi in 1962 and moved to London in 1964. He began working as an artist without any formal training, producing sculptures influenced by and by his engineering experience. In 1972, appalled by the institutionalised racism that he found to be endemic in Britain, he became interested in radical politics and joined the Black Panther movement. Six years later he founded and began editing the journal Black Phoenix, which, in 1989, was transformed into Third Text, one of the most important journals dealing with art, the third world, post-colonialism and ethnicity. His Paki Bastard: Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person (1977; see 1987 exh. cat.) and such as How Could One Paint a Self-Portrait! (1978–9; see 1987 exh. cat.) portray the British–Asian artist as under racial assault from his social environment and demonstrate a concern with the problems of establishing an identity for third world artists. In later works such as I Loves It. It Loves I (1978–83; see 1988 exh. cat.) and Green Painting (1985–6; London, AC England col.) he presented ritual as a form of specific culturally untranslatable resistance in the face of fantasies of global collective experience.
Bibliography
From Modernism to Postmodernism: Rasheed Araeen: a Retrospective (exh. cat., essays by P. Bickers, J. Roberts, and D. Phillipi, Birmingham, Ikon Gal., 1987)
Rasheed Araeen (exh. cat., essay by P. Overy, London, S. London A. G., 1994) FRANCIS SUMMERS
26 March 2001
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