Tate Modern Talk

Uniqlo Tate Play: Zero to Infinity Rasheed Araeen In Conversation

27 July 2023 at 18.30–19.30

Photo © Tate (Lucy Dawkins)

Explore the trajectory of Zero to Infinity with artist Rasheed Araeen

Join us for a conversation with Rasheed Araeen and Dr Sadia Shirazi (Curator, International Art, Tate Modern). The discussion will follow the transnational journey of Rasheed Araeen’s interactive sculpture, Zero to Infinity which will be brought to the Turbine Hall this summer, in the largest iteration of this work to date.

Zero to Infinity has now had over thirteen iterations. Made of four hundred latticed cubes painted red, green, yellow and blue. The cubes are set in a static grid formation and are then touched, stacked and reassembled by visitors daily, in what the artist has described as the work coming ‘alive.’

From Karachi in the 1960s to present day London, this conversation will trace the work’s journey over the past four decades and across two continents, exploring both its entangled intellectual trajectory and the racial-geographic exclusions of Euro-American postwar histories of art.

The event will be filmed and livestreamed.

UNIQLO Tate Play: Rasheed Araeen Zero To Infinity in partnership with UNIQLO. Talk organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor

Rasheed Araeen

Rasheed Araeen (b. 1935, Karachi) is from Pakistan, but lives and works in London. He is an artist, writer and inventor (international patent 2002), and the founding editor of Third Text. He began his career in Pakistan in 1953, whilst also studying civil engineering. After establishing himself as an artist in Karachi, he moved to the UK in 1964; and soon after (1965) he produced sculpture, which was a pioneering work of minimalism (Tate, 2007).

In the 1960s and 1970s, he became active in groups supporting liberation struggles, democracy and human rights, which led him to writing Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto (1975-76), and to editing the journals Black Phoenix (1978-79), Third Text (1987-2011) and Third Text Asia (2008-09). In 1989, he curated the exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain at the Hayward Gallery.

Since 2015, he has been showing internationally; and his work is now in the major museums, including MoMa (NY), Pompidou Centre (Paris) and Tate (UK). A Retrospective of his work was held in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland, (2018), which then travelled to MOMCA, Geneva (Switzerland), The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Masco (Russia) and Baltic Gallery, Gateshead, UK.

Sadia Shirazi

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, curator and architect based in London and New York. Shirazi is Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. Their current book project, Fugitive Movements, is a series of microhistories of artists whose careers traversed South Asia, the Indian Ocean, Europe and the United States. Shirazi is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.

All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Turbine Hall and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner Street.

There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Natalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.

Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.

To help plan your visit to Tate Modern, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.

Download Tate Modern map PDF