How Could One Paint a Self-Portrait

Series: Self Portrait Series

The late 1970s witnessed a significant shift in Rasheed Araeen’s practice, coinciding with broader political unrest in the United Kingdom and Europe. Frustrated at the willful rejection of his work at an institutional level, Araeen created a series of portraits in which he seemed to vandalise his own image. This body of work displays the culture wars at play in the west at the time, reflecting the racist trauma in advance of its claim to power over the subject it seeks to subjugate.