Figures of speech
The realisation that one is poor, despite their wealth, is disturbing. So is the awareness as an artist that your pictorial diction is not understood or acknowledged. This is a phenomenon many from the Global South accepted as their fate; but not Rasheed Araeen. On moving to the United Kingdom, the artist resisted marginalisation, discrimination and a patronising attitude from the mainstream (read the white Western) art world. His practice of 63 years demonstrates this.
A recently concluded solo exhibition, Rasheed Araeen: Sixty-Three Years of Figural (June 30-July 15, Grosvenor Gallery at Frieze, 9 Cork Street, London), showcased his works from various phases of his long and intense career. Works from 1960 to 2023, included pastel, ink and pen on paper, photographic prints, collages, sculptures, films recordings of his performances - and text on paper. Someone familiar with Araeen's history can testify that the artist, besides creating images, composed manifestos; published an academic journal, Third Text; wrote (and edited) a number of books; contributed numerous essays; gave talks and lectures; all part of an attempt to provide a voice to a muted and muffled community in an age and atmosphere of racism.
The exhibition in London was conceived around the figure (hence called Figural). However, the work also revealed the artist's major concerns: the imbalance of power; West against Eastl male controlling the female; the rich subjugating the poor; and the elusive world of art in comparison with ordinary lives. One was able to locate all these threads in the brilliantly curated exhibition, with Araeen's earliest pastel on paper (Matrimony, 1960), a stylised/ Cubist composition of a mother and child, accompanying another work (Male Ego, 2007), that comprised an enlarged print of the initial pastel and six additional text frames, all referring to infantile male ego behind its dominance, oppression and violence.
Male, or a white male, or a dominating white male, is a prominent subject Rasheed Araeen approached again and again, dismantling its oeuvre. The exhibition was about the human figure, yet Araeen used the idiom of the body to convey issues of power, tyranny and prejudice, especially related to race. In his performance Paki Bastard (Portraits of the Artist as a Black Person) made in 1977, and comprising "40 projected images/ slides and sound, 25 minutes" Araeen referred to once regular and widely uttered hate speech. The clash between the white population and those who migrated from the colonised countries of Asia, Africa and Caribbean manifested in this and many other forms.
Dichotomies considered normal in nature/past that ended up becoming an instrument of supremacy and subjugation are keystones to the grand architecture of Rasheed Araeen's aesthetics.
It also showed in bloody confrontation; as documented by the artist in a photographic collage (When They Meet, 1973) of protestors on the street, and the police force on their steeds. These photographs are not journalistic snapshots, but they create a cartography of mighty power next to nobodies. Seen today, they remind on of Milan Kundera's writings, in which an insignificant occurrence, or object has the potential to narrate the entire structure/ system of subjugation, or to deflate it; as witnessed in this group of 20 pictures. In one photo, a cop standing close to an array of armed personnel, appears to be sneezing in his handkerchief. Another picture shows two sides of men - the British police and the immigrant agitators - with some officer's cap lying on the ground.
The relationship -often turned sour, is one of the recurring motifs in Araeen's work. But instead of being a direct dissentient, he sought a diction that digs deep into the psychology of this unjust equation. Human body, as seen in one after another work at the Grosvenor Gallery's show, is a field of injustice. It is also a tool of exploitation. The work explores how the former colonial rulers manipulated the conquered societies through objects, images, ideas and language; and how the illusion of beauty, perfection and goodness is still projected in the minds, souls, bodies and the wallets of large populations of the world, whether from the former colonies or surviving on the periphery in the First World.
For example, in an image from a group of four collages (The Golden Series, 1974-78), you come across a grid of six naked women posing for porn magazines. Araeen cut their faces, added ideal measurements in blank areas, and pasted the removed pieces by reversing them/ their identities at the base of the work - next to another photograph of a female working in a field. The caption reads: Must we always wait for pictures like this?
The work could be compared to Ijaz-ul Hassan's Rifle Butt, 1974, in which a sequence of semi-nude Western and indigenous beauties are grouped next to a female victim from Vietnam, with a gun pointed to her head. In a series of nine discs, It was the Time, 1975, Araeen combined words of Ho Chi Minh with visuals of Vietcong warriors.
Men or women, white or black, colonial or colonised, the dichotomies considered normal in nature/ past that ended up becoming the instrument of supremacy and subjugation are the keystones of the grand architecture of Rasheed Araeen's aesthetics.
He chose several formal devices - like the national flag - to communicate his ideas. In his collages (six installed at the exhibition) the artist used the format of an English flag. The cross in all these works had green rectangles on four sides, whereas its shape illustrated scenes of sacrificial slaughter of Eid; newsprint cut-outs of toys and part of dowery stuff; commercial advertisements and TV footage of the Gulf War; a controversial novel, the USA, as well as a central painting consisting of an indigenous nude next to a section of Araeen's bookshelf, a news item about a Serbian attack, and two expressively rendered canvases. (All three paintings were picked from a heap of discarded stuff in London.)
In all of this work, the foundational structure - the English flag is a cross. The cross is also the real content of the varied work. Jesus was crucified in Palestine (in his Falisteen, 1974, Araeen placed a picture showing him collecting funds for the Palestine after 1973 Arab Israel war. The title denotes the way the name of the disputed land is spelled by its Arab inhabitants). For most believers, crucifixion was an atrocity by the Romans that eventually emerged as a means of redeeming the human race. Transposing this religious metaphor into contemporary politics, Rasheed Araeen signified other scarifies, other victims, other oppressors; and may be other salvations. The fact that the adjoining areas in the English flag's cross are green suggests a clash between two views of the world. This is not different from the perception of events from the position of a coastguard and of an immigrant trying to reach the shores of Southern Europe. Both look at each other uncomfortably, suspiciously and threateningly.
This is the story of everyone who managed to crossover. It relates to every boundary, every barrier and every limitation in art, literature, ethnicity, class and gender. The art of Rasheed Araeen is not a means to forget the past, origins, or politics attached to these, but to recognise, comment and find means to make one's presence felt. In a set of four colour photographs, Christmas Day 1979, Rasheed Araeen has shown himself travelling round and round in the Circle Line tube. Finding the city deserted, he recalls that in Karachi when there was a religious celebration or national holiday, everyone came out on to the streets and the parks were full; in contrast everyone stays at home in London."
In a sense, in his other body of work, the sculptures of geometric constructions in multiple hues and combinations, probably Rasheed Araeen is seeking a connection that he didn't find with the soil of his adapted land, but in the heart of his cultural past. History - like the basic square, rectangle, circle and triangle - is not confined to a tribe, a period or a region; it belongs to the humanity.
