RASHEED Araeen has the distinction of being an artist representative of one of the most complex and illusive aspects of Pakistan’s art history, a fact recognised by Amra Ali, editor of Rasheed Araeen: Homecoming. An engineer by training, born and raised in Pakistan, Araeen became a pioneer of minimalist sculpture in Britain in the 1960s. Despite his move to Europe, his work was viewed through the lens of post-colonialism and as such the following decades witnessed overt political content in his performance art, photography, painting, and sculpture. His training as an engineer lay the foundations for geometric structures, grids, and linear networks that are most associated with Araeen’s work.

The uniqueness of the time marked by Homecoming is the display of Araeen’s work from 1953 to 1964 which was produced prior to his departure for London, and his work produced in Karachi after his return in 2010, in the city where the work came to fruition. His earliest work documents the nascence of minimalist art in the city and is a significant historical documentation of the 1950s. The latest works are of course, as Amra writes, the “journey into minimalism and beyond, into what may now be at its centre”.

The early works were hidden in what the artist calls safe storage and in the juxtaposition of the two distinct collections within the body of work, a symbolic shift is visible: “in Araeen’s own view, ‘addressing his own modernity’, and also to contemplate on the nature of modernity in Pakistan, and by that token ‘it’s real history’”. Much of the work in Europe, of necessity, reflected the politics of a non-European artist in a post-colonial world, while the new work produced in Karachi between 2010-2014 reflects on a “neglected history and looks to philosophic sources outside the Western frame”. His journey to post-modernity, then, is one of liberation — liberation of the artist’s imagination from the weight of Western culture.

Calling the transitions and many facets of his work “a journey of the idea”, Araeen’s work draws on childhood memories, humanism and movements of air and water. Amra writes, “The connections of time and place, present and past, are closely intertwined; perhaps because Araeen doesn’t merely make art, he thinks it”. The renowned artist contextualises his own work by changing the parameters within which his contemporaries, Hanif Ramay and Sadequain, produced their equally significant works. He says, “In Pakistan, then and even now, modernism meant that which could be referred to as the already established modernism in the West, and then its somewhat second-degree expressions in the rest of the world. In my work, the audience could not find any reference to any of the work which was already known and recognised.”

Araeen’s iconoclasm becomes the subject of Aasim Akhtar’s essay, ‘In Search of the Real’, where he writes that “Rasheed Araeen challenged and tested anew all the conquests of artistic idiom handed down by the traditions of the modern movement. He refused to brook any compromise with classicism and naturalism, just as he refused to countenance either the grim deformities of Expressionism or the psychological slant of surrealistic forms.” An artist who was equally at home with scribbling ‘Demand of Life’ in 1961 with a biro pen and making the abstract Dancing Bodies series (1959-62), Araeen took inspiration where he found it, changing subjects into motifs and motifs into concepts evoking emotive content no longer restricted to the visual. Akhtar writes, “Stimuli impinge on him rapidly and are committed to paper and canvas with equal rapidity in a flurry of signs, while space is continually broken up by the intervals between one streak and another or by the meandering paths between tiny clusters of strokes.”

Araeen has reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement where each work is not a product but a production — it speaks and engages at the intellectual and emotional levels with the viewer. Akhtar writes, “At its deepest level, Araeen’s work is a dramatic and restless art, criss-crossed by incisive rhythms alternatively horizontal and vertical. Though the complementarity of colours is not always respected, their harmonies are used with consummate skill to break up the narrative continuity of the images, to point up a dramatic pause, to arrest a fleeting moment of silence and self-communion, before the thread of discourse is taken up again.”

His journey, however, included digressing from art to periods of protest, dissent and confrontation, periods that Nafisa Rizvi explores in her piece, ‘To Be Or Not To Be An Artist’. Tracing Araeen’s political activism to the anti-immigration fervour in Britain in the 1960s, she writes how Araeen joined the Black Panther Movement, an organisation with an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist agenda. These sentiments later found voice in his multimedia performance called ‘Paki Bastard’ in 1977. She writes, “He decries the idea of individualism and says it only heightens the narcissistic ego of the artist”. Araeen wrote, “Art must now go beyond the making of mere objects that are displayable in the museum or/and sold as precious commodities at the marketplace. Only then it can enter the world of everyday life and its collective energy that is struggling not only to improve life itself but to save it from its impending destruction on earth.” His life’s ambition has been to re-humanise the existence of people, to do it in harmony with nature and, as Rizvi writes, “to transcend the individual and embrace the collective”.

Homecoming, the body of works ongoing since 2010, completes the full circle of Araeen’s artistic endeavours as 60 years of art works return to Karachi. Iftikhar Dadi traces the various transitions of Araeen’s career, from the paintings and experimental forays into abstract forms in the 1950s, to the minimalist sculpture in the 1960s, to highly politically-charged works of the 1970s and 1980s. And while the circle is completed, Araeen has begun to delve into a new trajectory in his latest works exploring geometrical forms as ‘Islamic’ and as universal along with minimalism.

In this sense the term ‘homecoming’ becomes even more expansive than that of the artist returning after six decades as his motifs in the paintings created in Karachi now are drawn from classic Islamic art and as he writes, “to the history that was submerged under the weight of Western culture, dominant in Pakistan as elsewhere in the world.” Invoking this “somewhat neglected history” appears to be a means for the Muslim world to “assert its presence and move forward in the modern world in its own way”.

Araeen’s art through the decades has continued to remain true to the utopian ideal of evading a Eurocentric philosophical and creative hegemony. In returning home, he has brought those ideas and the progression he made towards his current state to Karachi — a city that provided him with an affinity for water and a sense of self that found artistic and political expression when being the ‘other’ in Britain grew repressive.

The book Homecoming traces Araeen’s multiple locations and dislocations as Dadi, Akhtar, Rizvi and Ali form connections between his works, past and present, his motifs, bygone and current, and his mediums and palette. In a short compilation the reader is drawn into the world of stimuli that Araeen experiences to see the harmonious world Araeen envisions.

Rasheed Araeen: Homecoming

(ART)

Edited by Amra Ali

VM Art Gallery, Karachi

ISBN 978-9692302807

116pp.