A Twist of Fate

Occasionally, unusual things happen to me that I can’t explain. I like to call them ‘brainstorms’. Fortunately, I have recognised these events as significant moments in my life, even if I didn’t understand them at the time.

I didn’t make my first sculpture; it came about. One afternoon in 1959, I was walking through a suburb of Karachi, returning home, when I saw a piece of metal lying on the ground. I immediately went to see what it was, and picked it up. Maybe it was the twisted shape that fascinated me. I took it home, cleared the table and placed it there. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was acting instinctively, with no thought of making art. My mother came into the room and asked, ‘What is this dirty thing you’ve put on the table?’ And I said, ‘It’s my sculpture.’

A few months earlier, I had been through an intense experience. I was with a friend who was interested in making paintings of people playing with a hula hoop. I was teasing him, saying, ‘It’s so banal, so ordinary – that can’t be a subject of art’. Suddenly, something happened to me. I fell into a state that you might call a trance and began to see a vertical, helical movement. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I became so taken up in that experience that I couldn’t just stand there, talking to my friend, so I asked him to take me home. When I got back, I took some paper from the drawer and just drew. I put the pencil on the paper, dragging it down, and a helical movement appeared. I still have that drawing from 1959.

Another of these ‘brainstorms’ happened to me in the summer of 1966, when visiting a friend, a sculptor, in Liège in Belgium. He knew I wanted to be an artist and was asking me about my plans. I didn’t know what to say, but then suddenly an idea came to me: I saw a huge architectural structure, 100 feet by 100 feet, made completely of steel. It would be a non-functional structure that people could go up and down. Maybe this was related to the experience I had had when visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris several years earlier. Of course, making the artwork was an impossibility – who would sponsor me to make this idiotic structure? Yet on my return, I made a series of small drawings of cubes with their sides bisected by diagonals. That idea came out of the blue, but it became the basis of my subject matter – right up to today. Sometimes I go through this process consciously because I feel a need to develop an idea, but there is always an unconscious level where ideas for art might appear.

^{UNIQLO Tate Play: Rasheed Araeen: Zero to Infinity, Tate Modern, 22 July – 28 August. UNIQLO Tate Play in partnership with UNIQLO.}

^{Rasheed Araeen is an artist who lives in London. This piece was adapted from a conversation between the artist and independent curator Marko Daniel when Zero to Infinity was displayed in The Tanks, Tate Modern in 2013}