Chakras

In 1969, Rasheed Araeen stood at the edge of St Katharine Docks in London and looked at what the water had become — a polluted, forgotten stretch, neglected by the city around it. He was a civil engineer by training, an artist only a few years into a second career, and what he made in response was not a monument. It was sixteen wooden discs, painted red, that he and a small group of collaborators threw into the water and let go.

Chakras (1969–70; reconstructed 1987) exists today as two things at once: sixteen painted discs, arranged in an 8 x 8 ft grid, resting on the gallery floor exactly as they were before they were ever thrown — and a series of photographs on the wall, documenting where the current actually took them. The piece is now part of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection. Araeen has described the underlying idea, in his own words, as an attempt "to break symmetry" — to take the rigid, self-contained order of Minimalist form and hand it over to something that could not be controlled.

That handing-over is where the piece actually lives, and it's what makes it feel less like an artwork and more like a question I recognise from somewhere else entirely.

What is it like for a mother to give birth to a child, to raise it, to expose it to the world, and to let go? What is it like for a father to hold its hands, to hold the cycle, and then release it? There is satisfaction in that, certainly. But is there also agitation — a flinch, right at the point of letting go?

Faith in nature, in the universe, in God, stays theoretical until we witness something that looks like a miracle. But what are the odds it was never a miracle at all — only the ordinary, indifferent momentum of things left to their own current? To surrender to that momentum, to let the tide carry what we've made, is close to the oldest gesture in every religion, every belief system. An initial act still belongs to human will. But the moment that act is complete, it is nature — not the maker — that decides what happens next.

Araeen's discs make that surrender literal. The grid was not indifferent to symmetry — it was minimalism in its most disciplined form, a perfect static order, sixteen identical red circles locked into a clean square. But what breaks out of that order, once the discs hit water, is narrative: drift, collision, dispersal, a current writing its own composition with someone else's material. The people who threw the discs in were not really performers. They were closer to parents at a graduation — present at the handover, mere catalysts, and then no longer in control of what comes next.

He used DayGlo orange-red — industrial fluorescent paint, not an artist's palette — because this was never a work built for someone to stand and contemplate at length. It needed to seize attention immediately, and be visible for exactly as long as the water allowed before carrying it out of sight.

And that raises the piece's real hinge: if the discs were released into the current, why is a version still on the floor, intact, geometric, untouched? Because Araeen built the piece as a deliberate pair — the reconstructed grid holding its original order, and the photographic record of the order breaking. Shown together, they aren't two versions of the same event. They're the entire distance between what we build and what we're willing to release, held open at once.

Araeen would later call this way of working "Biostructural Play" — a term he coined himself, before it evolved into the broader concept he named Zero to Infinity. "Bio," for life, for what is uncontrolled and organic; "Structure," for the engineer's own instinct toward order; "Play," for the act of handing that order over to something alive enough to undo it. It is his own definition of what happens when rigid geometry meets a living system it can no longer command. In the years after, the piece would keep evolving in his hands — resurfacing as "Disco Sailing," staged again decades later, never quite finished being let go of.

The gap between the engineer's grid and the current's redistribution of it is not a flaw in the work. It's the work's actual subject: nature's persistent, uncontestable claim on anything a person builds. And if there's a destination at the end of that claim, it isn't resolution. It's the recognition that release is never a single act — it's a condition you keep returning to, over and over, for as long as you keep making anything at all.