Articles by Kylie Gilchrist
Art Margins, 2023
In May 1970, Rasheed Araeen's work “8bS” appeared in Manufactured Art, a group exhibition dedicat... more In May 1970, Rasheed Araeen's work “8bS” appeared in Manufactured Art, a group exhibition dedicated to artistic engagements with industrial processes and advanced technology. Araeen's contribution, like many of his 1960–70s works, comprised lattice-like structures that engaged forms and techniques common to his professional training as a civil engineer. Like the Minimalist object, “8bS” deployed the grammar of productive techniques to structure artistic form, breaking with the compositional principles of formalist modernism and moving towards art beyond objecthood. Yet Araeen's contribution to Manufactured Art suggests that Araeen's structures also avoided the limitations of the Minimalist object's negative mimesis of technological infrastructure, while anticipating subsequent manoeuvres by artists such as Robert Morris. Revisiting Araeen's structures in Manufactured Art reinforces the singular importance of Araeen's structuralist modality, while provincializing US Minimalism as one of multiple trajectories working out of the stasis of modernist objecthood.
MAVCOR Journal, 2022
Rasheed Araeen's Bismullah (Fig. 1) is noteworthy as the first work by the Karachiborn, London-ba... more Rasheed Araeen's Bismullah (Fig. 1) is noteworthy as the first work by the Karachiborn, London-based artist to enter the collection of Britain's Tate Gallery in 1995. Part of Araeen's "Cruciform" series of the 1980s and 1990s, Bismullah is a wallmounted, mixed-media construction assembled from nine rectangular panels. 1 At each of the work's four corners sit canvases painted a verdant green and silk-screened with a delicate golden patterning that recalls vegetal and floral motifs common in Islamic architecture. The green panels are disconnected slightly from the work's inner components, and the white gallery wall appears in the gaps like fissures and borders internal to the work. 2 Set between the green panels are four identical photographs of candles, formed in the shape of a cross. The candles are set on a piece of glass that, on close inspection, appears to sit atop one of Araeen's own artworks: the threedimensional, open-faced "structural cubes" that the artist conceptualized in the mid-1960s. At the work's center is a photograph of a splash of blood, closely cropped to omit explanatory information. The vermillion shape is Rorschach-like, encouraging a play of associations.
New German Critique, 2021
This article investigates a problem in Theodor W. Adorno’s thought: how can Adorno critique advan... more This article investigates a problem in Theodor W. Adorno’s thought: how can Adorno critique advanced capitalist societies for their dehumanizing tendencies while also refusing the possibility of defining the human? Motivating this inquiry is a renewed investigation of philosophical anthropology by thinkers like Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas, who explore positive theories of human limits and needs as the basis of social critique. As Adorno consistently refused to define the human on philosophical and political grounds, this article asks whether his work offers an unexamined alternative to philosophical anthropology’s revival. A reconstruction of Adorno’s position shows how Adorno displaces anthropological problems into his philosophy of art, where the principle of mimesis offers a potentially nonanthropological model of human potential. Yet it also reveals how Adorno’s refusal to directly interrogate philosophical anthropology leads him to implicitly prescribe a certain figure of the human, undermining the value of his resistance to anthropological definitions.
Catalogue Essays by Kylie Gilchrist
Rasheed Araeen: A British Story, 2024
Rasheed Araeen at Aicon, 2023
The threads of thought animating Rasheed Araeen's 'Allah' series are numerous. Centred around the... more The threads of thought animating Rasheed Araeen's 'Allah' series are numerous. Centred around the word God written in Arabic calligraphy, Araeen's recent works condense the focused engagement with Islamic thought that the artist has pursued for more than a decade. 1 Yet they also mobilise ideas, motifs, and materials that have a longer trajectory in Araeen's practice. A calligraphed calendar that Araeen purchased during a 1972 visit to Karachi is the source of the striking calligraphic form in Al-Izmut (2022) (fig. 3) which renders the phrase hissizewill (the greatness of God) in a modular, multi-chromatic and interlocking configuration. In his 'Allah' paintings of 2021 (fig. 3), Araeen extends the formal and conceptual investigation of abstract calligraphy initiated in his 'Homecoming' series of 2010-14 (pg. 86-87).
Rasheed Araeen: Going East, Again (Hong Kong: Rossi & Rossi), 2020
In Going East, Again, Rasheed Araeen retraces his artistic journey over an impactful career of ne... more In Going East, Again, Rasheed Araeen retraces his artistic journey over an impactful career of nearly seventy years. His contributions encompass a multifaceted artistic practice – initiated in Pakistan in the early 1950s and continued in London since 1964 – as well as important publishing and curatorial endeavours that established a platform for artists from post-colonial diasporas, both within and beyond institutions of the Western metropole. Araeen has cut across national borders and institutional barriers throughout this work, bringing recognition to an expansively transnational history of artistic modernism and initiating more egalitarian frameworks for contemporary practice.
Book Reviews by Kylie Gilchrist
Reviews by Kylie Gilchrist
Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, 2023
The topic of this conversation between Sadia Shirazi and Rasheed Araeen was the large-scale parti... more The topic of this conversation between Sadia Shirazi and Rasheed Araeen was the large-scale participatory construction Zero to Infinity. Installed in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall between 22 July and 28 August 2023, the work comprised 400 wooden cubes with open faces bisected end-to-end by diagonal struts, each painted in a bright hue of red, yellow, blue or green. Among the various prior iterations of Zero to Infinity worldwide, this was one of the largest manifestations yet. At the exhibition's opening, the cubes were positioned in a perfectly symmetrical square array-a configuration determined by the artist. Visitors were then invited to break this static gridded construction and reconfigure the cubes into novel arrangements. The rigid structure was rapidly disassembled; cubes were scattered across the floor, stacked in precarious columns and massed together in irregular clusters. Thousands of individuals took part in this collective action of assemblage over the work's month-long presentation, transforming the inert grid into a continuous process of chromatic movement. This activity turned traditional hierarchies on their heads: the museum, traditionally a site of passive spectatorship and authority, became an arena for the public's self-directed collective creativity. The artist, traditionally the authorial creator, became a spectator of the work's cocreation.
e-flux Criticism, 2019
In one gruelingly unedited scene of Allan Sekula's three-hour Alm essay Lottery of the Sea (-..D)... more In one gruelingly unedited scene of Allan Sekula's three-hour Alm essay Lottery of the Sea (-..D), a Agure suited head-to-toe in white Tyvek hauls a gluey black lump across a slate-gray jetty. Steely waves wash up pebbles of oil, which she collects by rolling or smashing the lump upon them. Her mass will soon be lobbed into a rubber basket, foisted up a dune by a chain of hands, and deposited in a sea of oily baskets awaiting removal. The labor of viewing this protracted sequence faintly echoes its subject: the Sisyphean task of cleaning an oil spill on Spain's Galician coast, accomplished by volunteers and by hand. In a world where most things areas Sekula says of a Greek Ash market at the Alm's start-"fresh but dead," the scene's weary, weather-worn Agures testify to the fragile solitaries born in struggles to resist the wholesale extermination of human and nonhuman life. The Alm is housed in a screening room at the center of an exhibition purportedly dedicated to Sekula's photography,
MAP Magazine, 2019
Mohamed Melehi's signature composition features thick lines of paint, in bright and alternating c... more Mohamed Melehi's signature composition features thick lines of paint, in bright and alternating colours, zigzagging across canvas. In 'Untitled' (1975), they migrate diagonally corner to corner until the square edges of two lines touch. In 'Flamme' (1975), waves form an oscillating diamond bisected by straight lines jetting out from one corner. In Melehi's complex geometry-as rigorous as it is divergent-waves of colour redirect linear trajectories, break symmetrical structures or leave shapes open while pointing towards other intersections somewhere off the page.
e-flux Criticism, 2019
/, 12)* The "Grand Hotel Abyss" is home to a cast of strange and varied characters, each shelteri... more /, 12)* The "Grand Hotel Abyss" is home to a cast of strange and varied characters, each sheltering from the raging incoherence of today's world. Whether this lavish destination is a plush cover for paralysis or a temporary abode that opens to glimpses of something new is the knife-edged tension that the theme for this edition of the festival creates. Director and chief curator Ekaterina Degot's opening speech at Graz's stately Landhaushof engaged the courtyard's imperialist architecture to reOect on the imbrication of art, power, and hedonism at the core of the increasingly troubled European project. Her words announced the red thread weaving through the festival's program, which balances the spectacular and performative alongside research-driven exhibitions and discussions, as well as ephemeral interventions,
MAP Magazine, 2018
Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo Andy Keate 'Doors' opens onto a te... more Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo Andy Keate 'Doors' opens onto a tenebrous expanse, dimly lit and nearly empty. In the absence of images and objects, the resonant waves of Ourahmane's sound installation 'Paradis' (2018) saturate the space. Amidst low thrums and drones, this hour-long audio work intersperses bursts of daily life and speech in Arabic and French, collected from field recordings made
Co-Convened Panels and Conferences by Kylie Gilchrist
Journée d'Études: Art concret + universel = Constructif avec boussole, 2024
Karachi Biennial Discursive Weekend, 2024
While the histories and ongoing effects of empire have become major areas of art historical focus... more While the histories and ongoing effects of empire have become major areas of art historical focus, the 1970s remains an overlooked decade in this growing field of scholarship. Partly fuelling this oversight is the common narrative of the 1970s as a period marking the end of Britain's empire. This seminar instead asks how the British empire's breakdown abroad spurred imperialism to turn inwards, manifesting domestically in an upsurge in racist discourses and institutionalized practices, deepening conflicts in Northern Ireland, and new state techniques of social control and 'crisis management'. It explores how artistic responses to this context entailed a radical rethinking of art: a repudiation of formalist and object-based practices in favour of conceptually-driven artistic tactics that increasingly engaged social systems as both artistic material and locus of critique.
Co-convened with Luke Skrebowski at the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, this seminar invited reflection on the ways these new artistic modalities critically engaged the internal recodings of imperialism, seeking to articulate the 1970s as a period of interconnected ‘system shifts’ in Britain's artistic practices, socio-political situation, and geopolitical position. It featured papers by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Kylie Gilchrist, Adeena Mey, Lynn MacRitchie, Luke Skrebowski, and Catherine Spencer, moderated by Nikhil Vettukattil.
A session co-convened with Adeena Mey and Luke Skrebowski at the 2023 Association for Art History... more A session co-convened with Adeena Mey and Luke Skrebowski at the 2023 Association for Art History Annual Conference.
At the outset of the 1970s, the onset of a global economic downturn, breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and rise of nationalisms among oil-producing Arab states, among other factors, produced a series of crises in the US-led postwar order and its mode of governmentality. The decade erupted into what Grégoire Chamayou, drawing on Michel Foucault, has termed the ‘ungovernable society’ attacking colonial, racial, gendered, class-based, and other forms of domination. At the same time emerged a new mode of governmentality in the form of ‘authoritarian liberalism’, conjoining a strong repressive state and free market economy, evident to varying degrees in countries including Chile, Argentina, and the UK.
Artistic responses to the system shifts and intertwined crises of the 1970s have typically been narrated, from a Euro-American perspective, as a critique of the modernist object and a turn towards participatory, conceptual, performance-based, and other modes of ‘dematerialised’ practices. This panel endeavours to develop a more global view of geo-historically specific yet interconnected practices by asking how artistic form – and practices of form-making more broadly – responded to the crisis of governmentality and new techniques of authoritarian liberalism characterising the 1970s. It invited papers addressing this question through urban, regional, or network-based case studies, critically engaging frameworks including, but not limited to, world systems theory, historical sociology, and international relations in order to do so.
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Articles by Kylie Gilchrist
Catalogue Essays by Kylie Gilchrist
Book Reviews by Kylie Gilchrist
Reviews by Kylie Gilchrist
Co-Convened Panels and Conferences by Kylie Gilchrist
Co-convened with Luke Skrebowski at the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, this seminar invited reflection on the ways these new artistic modalities critically engaged the internal recodings of imperialism, seeking to articulate the 1970s as a period of interconnected ‘system shifts’ in Britain's artistic practices, socio-political situation, and geopolitical position. It featured papers by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Kylie Gilchrist, Adeena Mey, Lynn MacRitchie, Luke Skrebowski, and Catherine Spencer, moderated by Nikhil Vettukattil.
At the outset of the 1970s, the onset of a global economic downturn, breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and rise of nationalisms among oil-producing Arab states, among other factors, produced a series of crises in the US-led postwar order and its mode of governmentality. The decade erupted into what Grégoire Chamayou, drawing on Michel Foucault, has termed the ‘ungovernable society’ attacking colonial, racial, gendered, class-based, and other forms of domination. At the same time emerged a new mode of governmentality in the form of ‘authoritarian liberalism’, conjoining a strong repressive state and free market economy, evident to varying degrees in countries including Chile, Argentina, and the UK.
Artistic responses to the system shifts and intertwined crises of the 1970s have typically been narrated, from a Euro-American perspective, as a critique of the modernist object and a turn towards participatory, conceptual, performance-based, and other modes of ‘dematerialised’ practices. This panel endeavours to develop a more global view of geo-historically specific yet interconnected practices by asking how artistic form – and practices of form-making more broadly – responded to the crisis of governmentality and new techniques of authoritarian liberalism characterising the 1970s. It invited papers addressing this question through urban, regional, or network-based case studies, critically engaging frameworks including, but not limited to, world systems theory, historical sociology, and international relations in order to do so.
Co-convened with Luke Skrebowski at the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester, this seminar invited reflection on the ways these new artistic modalities critically engaged the internal recodings of imperialism, seeking to articulate the 1970s as a period of interconnected ‘system shifts’ in Britain's artistic practices, socio-political situation, and geopolitical position. It featured papers by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Kylie Gilchrist, Adeena Mey, Lynn MacRitchie, Luke Skrebowski, and Catherine Spencer, moderated by Nikhil Vettukattil.
At the outset of the 1970s, the onset of a global economic downturn, breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and rise of nationalisms among oil-producing Arab states, among other factors, produced a series of crises in the US-led postwar order and its mode of governmentality. The decade erupted into what Grégoire Chamayou, drawing on Michel Foucault, has termed the ‘ungovernable society’ attacking colonial, racial, gendered, class-based, and other forms of domination. At the same time emerged a new mode of governmentality in the form of ‘authoritarian liberalism’, conjoining a strong repressive state and free market economy, evident to varying degrees in countries including Chile, Argentina, and the UK.
Artistic responses to the system shifts and intertwined crises of the 1970s have typically been narrated, from a Euro-American perspective, as a critique of the modernist object and a turn towards participatory, conceptual, performance-based, and other modes of ‘dematerialised’ practices. This panel endeavours to develop a more global view of geo-historically specific yet interconnected practices by asking how artistic form – and practices of form-making more broadly – responded to the crisis of governmentality and new techniques of authoritarian liberalism characterising the 1970s. It invited papers addressing this question through urban, regional, or network-based case studies, critically engaging frameworks including, but not limited to, world systems theory, historical sociology, and international relations in order to do so.