Nick Aikens (b. 1981, London) has been a tutor at the DAI Art Praxis since 2013. He is currently a curator at the Van Abbemuseum (since 2012). Recent and ongoing projects have focused on the 1980s and specifically the UK Black Arts Movement, and a retrospective / monograph on Rasheed Araeen. He leads the current research program Deviant Practice at the Van Abbemuseum. He is a Research Affiliate, CCC at the Visual Arts Department, HEAD, Geneva (since 2016) and a member of the editorial board for L’Internationale Online (since 2013). He was also recently a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2015-17)
Rasheed Araeen (b. 1935, Karachi, Pakistan) is a sculptor, painter, installation and video artist, political activist, and publisher. He studied to be an engineer in Pakistan, but in the 1960s moved to London, where he became one of the key minimalist artists of his generation. Having experienced racism in the British art world, in the mid-1970s he produced a series of political videos and performances and founded and became the editor of the journal Black Phoenix. In 1987, he founded the journal Third Text, devoted to the art of “third world” practitioners, postcolonial issues, multiculturalism, and identity politics. In 1989, Araeen curated The Other Story, an exhibition of European-based artists who came from former British colonies. The mid- 2010s saw a new wave of interest in his art: in 2017 he took part in the Venice Biennale and Documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel) and had his first major retrospective exhibition, which spanned his career from Karachi-era drawings to recent paintings and sculpture, at Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands). He lives and works in London.
