Becoming Political — Overview

In 1969, Araeen received the John Moores Prize for painting, first time a sculptor had been acknowledged. The accolade made Araeen optimistic about his prospects of entering the British art world, but his optimism was short-lived. Trying to secure gallery representation, Araeen showed his work to dealers, only to be told that American and European artists need only apply. Araeen started to read anti-colonial thinkers, especially Frantz Fanon, to understand the balance of power in the global perspective. He got closer to other artists from the countries of British commonwealth, and since 1973 participated in activities of 'Artists for Democracy', a group founded by David Medalla, Guy Brett, John Dugger and Cecilia Vicuña.

'Artists for Democracy' promoted awareness of the situation in Chile after the US-backed coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power and started several decades of rightwing terror in the country. Araeen showed a retrospective of his work in the space that 'Artists for Democracy' 'squatted, and in 1977 presented his important multi-media work 'Paki Bastard' there. In the same year the artist co-founded the magazine 'Black Phoenix', which was dedicated to art, politics, and culture in the Third World. The first issue contained Araeen's 'Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto', a scathing critique of American cultural domination in the arts. Araeen was scathing about America's latest export, Pop Art, and expressed disillusion with the current state of American culture. This may look surprising, given that Araeen's primary connection to art and architecture was established in an American library in Karachi, but his move to Europe had exposed the artist to an even higher degree of American omnipresence in everyday culture, as American politicians made sure that the libraries and cultural centers in Third World countries projected a more sophisticated image, bypassing Hollywood and celebrity culture altogether.

Delving deeper into politics, Araeen decided to use his identity to promote important causes. He introduced self-portraiture and Urdu script into his work in order to establish that identity as something culturally separate from the English-language, white norm, while deliberately obstructing the Western viewer from reading the image. This was also tied to the widespread exploration of identity politics by oppressed groups in the West. Araeen’s use of newspaper clippings and photographs is reminiscent of the avant-garde practice of ‘literature of fact’, a way of documentary writing developed by Sergey Tretyakov in the 1920s. Tretyakov and his colleagues used first-person accounts and montage to dispel what they perceived as Western bourgeois fictions. As a rebuttal of these fictions they put forward what they considered a more humane alternative to the market economy: the practice of collective agricultural and industrial labor under state control. Since the middle of the 1990s Araeen has proposed a number of projects that straddle the line between collective, communitarian effort and the autonomous artwork. These projects, A Proposal for a Collective Farm in Balochistan, Mediterranea and Astthesis, can be seen to the left of the entrance in the video boxes.