Rana Begum

No. 1225 Chainlink

b. Sylhet, Bangladesh, 1977
Based in London, United Kingdom

No.1225 Chainlink
33.775917, -116.368694
Palm Desert, California, USA
Desert X 2023

Rana Begum is a British-Bangladeshi artist whose work blurs boundaries between painting, sculpture, design and architecture. She is influenced by both minimalism and her childhood experiences encountering spiritual architecture in Bangladesh. She combines an early childhood sense of calm contemplation that she found in repetition and ritual with a fascination for urban structures and industrial materials to create a conversation between form, color and light. Her works absorb and reflect varied densities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial, with a unique style of rhyming geometry and color.

Responding to the ubiquity of the chain-link fence as a pattern spread across the Coachella Valley — a material that is meant to protect but also carries associations of violence — Begum diffuses the material’s role as a divider through her manipulation of its form and color. We notice how light and air, sand and water, as well as people, can filter through her cloud-like pavilion, which offers paths of expansive escape rather than reductive confinement. Constantly changing with the movement of the sun and the visitors inside of it, the work emphasizes that nothing in life is static; everything, from the world outside to our emotions within, is in a continual state of flux.

Generous support is provided by Hourglass Cosmetics and the City of Palm Desert.