Rasheed Araeen

Rasheed Araeen trained as a civil engineer in Karachi before becoming a prolific sculpture artist. In 1964 he moved to London and quickly established himself as one of the pioneers of British minimalist sculpture.

In his first few years in Britain, Araeen made a living as a working artist and was awarded the prestigious John Moores Prize at the Biennial Exhibition in Liverpool in 1969. However, his time in Britain, shaped by racism, led Araeen to address his lived experience in his art. In 1977 he performed Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person).

Araeen described himself as Black, as was common for South Asian activists in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a leading member of the British Black Arts Movement. In 1972 he joined the British Black Panther movement and was the founding editor of Black Phoenix in 1978. In 1987 he founded Third Text, which was an important journal for postcolonial art and theory, including writings by Araeen, Paul Gilroy, Edward Said and Geeta Kapur, among others. He founded Kala Press to disseminate information on neglected African and Asian artists in Britain who contributed to the development of post-war British art.

In 1989 Araeen curated The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain at London’s Hayward Gallery, which included works by Francis Newton Souza among others. This was the first major retrospective of work by Asian and African artists in Britain, all of whom had contributed greatly to the artistic scene since the 1950s.

Araeen’s own work has been exhibited widely around the world and was the subject of retrospectives in 2018 and 2025.