When Rana Begum was a young child in Sylhet, Bangladesh, she recalls reading the Qur’an and praying five times each day. That practice, along with formative memories observing light dance across rice fields and bathing pools, cemented an unbreakable connection to rhythm and color that endured when her family relocated to England—and continues to guide her as one of the contemporary art world’s most compelling talents. In the two decades since she studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she has built a remarkable body of sculptural work that translates elusive spatial and visual sensations into crisp, structured compositions grounded in minimalist abstraction.
Each work’s simplicity and repetition creates a calm, attentive state and encourages viewers to move and locate new readings. “I’m drawn to minimalism and artists like Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt,” she says. “I feel more at ease and contemplative in the presence of these works. They feel honest to their materials, raw yet refined.” The same clarity drives “Reflection,” the British Bangladeshi artist’s first Stateside museum survey at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Seven bodies of work converge to chart the evolution of her research around light and color, connecting her long engagement with movement and the early rhythms that shaped her.
“Reflection” gathers a scintillating array of Op Art–inflected pieces ranging from reflective works on paper to inventive uses of industrial materials: stainless steel folds, painted glass panels, chain link structures, and anodized aluminum paintings. Each responds differently as light shifts through the galleries, and many surfaces cast a steady radiance that glows across the walls. “Light is an essential element to experiencing the work and it heightens your senses as one moves around the show,” Begum says. She worked closely with chief curator Daniel S. Palmer to position each series within the museum’s linear layout so visitors register distinct changes from one grouping to the next.
Palmer knew how strongly the building responds to light after co-organizing a Dan Flavin exhibition with the Dia Art Foundation there last year. “I’ve been in dialogue with Begun for almost a decade, so I thought it would be meaningful to present a survey of her work over the last ten years as her American debut,” he explains. “Her exhibition continues to expand the legacies of Minimalism but through a global perspective.”
Uniting these bodies of work allows Begum to revisit her core investigations of light and color while studying how each material guides the outcome. “There are different hierarchies depending on the materials used,” she explains, and those shifts appear even with a single medium. The Reflector works, which layer glinting automobile reflectors across aluminum blocks, catch and redirect light; a nearby relief of vertically arranged aluminum strips reveals hidden bands of color that appear or recede as visitors change position. Her Louvre pieces, a sequence of painted glass wall sculptures with a mesmeric presence that nods to utilitarian vents and blinds, heighten these contrasts: “I wanted the show to contain those differences.”
Savannah carries a luminous heat that shifts through the day, moving from sharp brightness in the morning to a soft haze as humidity rises; that changing atmosphere guided many of Begum’s decisions. She studied these variations during each visit and noted how the light could sharpen edges before settling into a gentler register when the air grew heavy. “I was struck by the way the sunlight and heat create different atmospheres,” she says. Those conditions shaped how she arranged the sequence of works, and Palmer reinforced her observations by tuning the galleries to echo those shifts. He aligned corridors to catch transitions in illumination and set clear sight lines so visitors move through chromatic zones that mirror the city’s fluctuations.
