Rasheed Araeen

Rasheed Araeen (Urdu: رشید آرائیں; born 15 June 1935) is a Karachi-born, London-based conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, writer, and curator.

[2][3] By his own account, works created or imagined in this period such as Chakras (1969–1970) and Zero to Infinity (1968–2004[4]), while using basic structural units such as cubes, lattice and discs, were process-based and open to transformation by "the creative energy of the collective".

Chakras, the 16 red painted circular discs released on the water from Saint Katherine's Dock in 1970, would later evolve and give rise to the concept of Disco Sailing (1970–74), a new form between floating sculpture and dance.

In the first decade of its publication, the main aim was to reveal "the institutional closures of the art world and the artists they included, the second began the inquiry into the emergent phenomenon first signaled by the notorious show Magiciens de la terre of the assimilation of the exotic other into the new world art," as Sean Cubitt summarized the goals in the Third Text Reader in 2002.

[18] This provided a foretaste of The Other Story, a larger 1989 exhibition featuring artists including Araeen himself, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Uzo Egonu, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Donald Locke, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Ahmed Parvez, Ivan Peries, Keith Piper, F. N. Souza and Aubrey Williams.

Their opposition not only manifested cultural conflicts but was also meant to defend the purity of the gallery space where Araeen had proposed to perform the slaughter and consumption of a goat (according to a Muslim ritual).

Araeen's main key writings were edited in Spanish by curator José-Carlos Mariátegui and Metales Pesados, as Del Cero al Infinito: Escritos de Arte y Lucha.

[21] In 2019 he opened Shamiyaana, a restaurant/space in Stoke Newington, where people can enjoy simple, vibrant, nourishing, low-cost food in an environment purpose-designed for conversation and eating.