Walkthrough of the exhibition led by Kylie Gilchrist and screening of Rasheed Araeen’s work Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person), (1977)
Saturday, 1 July 2023
Walkthrough 11AM
Screening 11.30AM
Rasheed Araeen’s seminal performance, Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) was executed in 1977 at an exhibition staged by ‘Artists for Democracy’. The work was part of Araeen’s body of heavily political pieces, which began in 1973 with the collage work For Oluwale. The film consists of a montage of images of Asian immigrants on Brick Lane, interspersed with press cuttings describing race related attacks, portraits of Araeen’s family and of his minimalist structures. The film is set to a soundtrack including Handel’s Messiah, music from Bollywood films and racist chants by members of the National Front.
Kylie Gilchrist is an AHRC-NWCDTP PhD candidate in art history at the University of Manchester and was a visiting assistant in research at Yale University in Autumn 2022. She is completing a dissertation titled Structures of Transformation: The Politics of Artistic Form in the Work of Rasheed Araeen, 1952–1978.