H.G. Masters and Hoor Al Qasimi speak to the London-based Pakistani artist about his six-decade journey from Karachi to London, and his move from total invisibility to relative visibility

Rasheed Araeen: creating a global Modernism 

H.G. MASTERS Rasheed Araeen was born in 1935 and trained as a civil engineer, but always wanted to be an artist. Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s he realized this desire before moving to London in 1964. There he was a pioneer of minimalist sculpture and a searing advocate of postcolonial positions as put forward in the two magazines he founded&mdash;Black Phoenix in 1978 and Third Text in 1987&mdash;and as curator of the landmark exhibition The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. Through many works, including his recent abstract paintings that draw on the Abbasid period&mdash;the golden age of Arab/Muslim civilization, c. 800– 1200&mdash;he has consistently sought to realign our understanding of modernism imposed by the hegemonic discourses of the West. Third Text in particular has been a very influential academic publication looking at visual culture and art from around the globe, including Africa, South America, Middle East, and Asia. In 2014 Hoor Al Qasimi organized the first survey of Rasheed’s minimalist practice at the Sharjah Art Foundation, which renewed interest in both his work and the conversation around modernist art from non-Western traditions. Hoor, could you talk about how you got to know Rasheed’s practice?HOOR AL QASIMI I studied in London where I had seen Rasheed’s work, but I couldn’t place it in context. I wanted to know more. When I met Rasheed, we first discussed the possibilities of working on a conference together, but I quickly suggested an exhibition. Rasheed agreed. The exhibition was centered on his minimalist works, but he wanted to show them together with works realized before and after that period, such as his early painting experiments made in Karachi in the 1950s and 1960s and never shown outside Pakistan. Given the geographical location of Sharjah, where there is a very mixed community, it made total sense. I thought it would be important for the people of our region to know about and understand Rasheed’s important contribution to art history.

HGM Rasheed’s relationship with Minimalism is indeed very particular. What was your thinking when you realized these works in the 1960s and 1970s? RASHEED ARAEEN I have a problem with the word&nbsp;‘minimalism’, and I think the word&nbsp;‘minimalism’&nbsp;also has a problem with me! My journey toward symmetry and geometry was very different from the way Minimalism developed in New York. The word&nbsp;‘minimalism’&nbsp;started to be used in the 1966s when art historians were looking at what has been created after the Russian Constructivists, by Kasimir Malevitch, Piet Mondrian, and later David Smith. Postwar American artists had this knowledge in front of them and had to deal with the question: ‘How can we go forward and beyond what has already happened historically?’&nbsp;My case was totally different. I was living on the periphery of the Western world where there were no art schools, no galleries, no museums. In Pakistan all the modernist culture we had was imported from the West: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, etc. There was no knowledge about Russian Constructivism, Dadaism, or Futurism. This was the atmosphere in which I grew up as an artist. My practice began with what I had been taught at school, which was mostly&nbsp;‘you paint what you see.’&nbsp;This is what I did in the 1950s. In 1958 I started to paint boats in the Karachi harbor that eventually led to the Boats Towards Abstraction series (1958–1962). Looking at the boats’ shapes I began to be more and more interested in geometric forms, in the triangle, in vertical lines. Then I visited the city of Hyderabad that is 150 kilometers from Karachi. I was fascinated by its architecture, particularly by the wind towers. Located on the tops of houses, they help the air to go into the house and keep the house cool. What fascinated me was the form of the wind towers, their shape. When I came back to Karachi, I began to work with that shape and developed the idea of geometry further. To keep this story short, my geometric work came from my life experience. When I reached London in 1964, I came across the work of Anthony Caro. My immediate response was fascination. However, to be fascinated by someone wasn’t enough. I had to invent my own vocabulary, to work toward something new. I wanted to forget everything I did in Karachi and start afresh. I decided I should become a sculptor despite the fact that I had no training in sculpture. I couldn’t even handle the tools. Instinctively I hit upon the idea of sculpture as a symmetrical structure. Several years later I developed the lattice structure. The lattice structure gives you all the elements in my work: triangles and vertical movement. That is the connection between the work I did in Pakistan and what I have developed since then. But when I showed my symmetrically-arranged lattice structures in 1969–1970, some people thought it was Islamic art. However, I had a dilemma at that time because I had never been interested in Islamic art. I have spent the rest of my life ignoring the idea that my work had something to do with Islamic art. I changed my mind recently and have been working around this crossroads between minimalism and Islamic art with my abstract paintings.

HGM In terms of being ignored by the mainstream art establishment in London at the time and being aware of the racist overtones of that situation, could you talk about what led you to publish your own catalogue entitled Making Myself Visible?RA Making Myself Visible was published in 1984, exactly 20 years after I came to London. During the 1960s and 1970s I did many things. I pursued the idea of geometry and symmetry with my structures. What was striking to me was that some people admired my work, including a very important gallery, but I could not really exhibit. They said:&nbsp;‘We love your work, but sorry, we can’t show you.’&nbsp;I asked:&nbsp;‘Why not?’&nbsp;And they said:&nbsp;‘We only show American and English artists.’&nbsp;That meant they could only show white artists. My experience of the art world in London was shattering. I was puzzled and didn’t know how to carry on with my work. By chance, I soon realized that what I was experiencing had little to do with my work, but was the result of the new colonial condition. After all, I was living at the center of the British Empire. This awareness and political awakening changed my life and also my practice, because I started to work with collage, performance, and photography. On the advice of some friends, I joined the Black Panthers and worked in the streets in Brixton and in the North. I also began to write. In 1975 I wrote the Black Manifesto, in which I outlined what the future of art in the Third World could be. I was close to Filipino artist David Medalla and we talked a lot about art and politics. In 1978 I began publishing Black Phoenix, because I realized what we needed was a collective to reform and speak up against this new colonial status. However, after doing all that I still remained invisible. I had no place within the British art world. So I thought it was time to collect all my writings, all the work I had done, and put them together and let people know what I had done over 20 years.

HGM What about today? How do you feel about your visibility in the art world almost 35 years later?RA I am visible and at the same time invisible. I don’t know. When I say I am visible, it means that I am known in the London art world. The institutions know of my existence. I currently have an exhibition touring in Eindhoven, Geneva, Gateshead, and Moscow. But at the same time I am still excluded from the academic programs. There has been no historical exhibition in England about the last 50 years in which I have been included&mdash; that is what I mean by invisibility. HGM Did a similar kind of impetus drive the founding of Third Text? RA When I began to write in the 1970s it was not only for personal reasons. It was a collective issue. On the one hand, we had the Imperial World; on the other the post-imperial World that is sometimes called the Third World. When I began to write, there was no visibility for any artist from Africa, Asia, or even Latin America. The art history books were only about European and North American artists. The situation has really changed in the last 30 years. I would say things began to change&mdash;very slowly&mdash;in the 1980s because of two developments, the first being the beginning of multiculturalism in Britain and America. Institutions began to implement affirmative action policies and to promote non-white artists and academics. The second thing that happened more recently was the globalization of capital, and correspondingly the globalization of the art market. The art market wanted more than they could get from Europe and America. Because of this expansion, institutions looked beyond Europe toward Africa and Asia. Artists from all over the world are now more visible; they are everywhere. But there are different kinds of visibility. Those who are being celebrated today in our globalized age still exist outside of art history. Art history continues to be mostly the history of the achievements of white European and North American artists. There is inclusion and at the same time exclusion.First published in&nbsp;Art Basel | Year 49&nbsp;Top photo:&nbsp;Rasheed Araeen, Hong Kong Blues (detail), 2018, installation view in Harbour Arts sculpture park

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