Suspended nearly twenty feet high in the Ismaili Center’s East Atrium, No. 1573 Reflectors is built directly around the rhythm of the space it occupies. Made from reflective material, the work catches, scatters and redirects daylight as it moves through the atrium, so the piece is never quite the same twice; its surface changes with the sun, with the time, with the viewer’s position. In this, it sits alongside a wider lineage already established in Houston, including James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany and Mark Rothko’s paintings at the Rothko Chapel, works that also treat light itself as the primary material of a sacred or contemplative space.
Across her practice, Rana Begum takes industrial, often overlooked materials, in this case reflective surfaces, more commonly found doing practical work in the built environment, and reshapes them into geometric compositions rooted in the patterns of Islamic art and architecture. Color, material and form are arranged not as a fixed image but as a live condition: something that keeps shifting as sunlight moves through the room and as the viewer moves through it in turn.
