For more than two decades, Rana Begum has explored how light, colour and geometry can alter our perception of space. Moving between sculpture, painting and architecture, her practice draws equally from the repetitive patterns of Islamic art, the rhythms of the urban landscape and the formal language of Minimalism.

In Taking Form, her fifth solo exhibition at The Third Line in Dubai, Begum introduces a new body of work spanning wool, linen, wood and paper. At the centre of the exhibition are monumental woven tapestries suspended from the ceiling, their shifting patterns revealed only as visitors move through the gallery. Alongside them, diluted acrylic is absorbed into raw linen, watercolour marks test the relationships between hues, and wooden panels offer smaller, more concentrated studies of colour.

Born in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and based in London, Begum brings personal memories of weaving, faith and architecture into dialogue with abstraction. Here, she discusses the move towards softer materials, the influence of two very different landscapes, and why a work is never complete until the viewer begins to move around it.

— Your practice began with a strong engagement with hard, reflective materials such as metal, glass and stone. What prompted your recent movement towards softer, more absorbent materials like wool and linen?

— It started with a commission in 2022, designing a series of tapestries and woven textile installations for the Bristol Beacon in collaboration with the textile studio Dash & Miller. That collaboration opened something up that has carried straight through into this new body of work.

But woven material was already there in the background for me long before that. I grew up weaving baskets in Bangladesh. With materials like metal, glass and stone, colour comes from light bouncing off a surface. With wool and linen, the colour is inside the material itself; it is absorbed rather than reflected. That is a genuinely different way of working, and it felt like time to follow it properly and give it the space it deserved.

— You were born in Sylhet and now live and work in London. How have these different cultural and architectural environments shaped your visual language and understanding of geometry?

— Sylhet gave me geometry before I had any language for it: light moving across rice fields and bathing pools; the repetition of daily prayer; the patterns inside a mosque with windows on all sides and a water fountain at the front. Sound, light and rhythm were all happening together.

When I moved to England, I found the same instincts again, but expressed through a completely different vocabulary: the industrial cityscape, repetition within the urban landscape and, later, Minimalism at art school.

Louis Kahn’s Parliament Building in Dhaka and Salisbury Cathedral have both stayed with me, too. They represent two very different architectural traditions that somehow speak to the same underlying interest in order and repetition.

— Islamic geometry often suggests infinity: a pattern continues beyond the boundaries imposed upon it. What does that idea of continuation mean to you personally, particularly in the context of this exhibition?

— That idea has been with me since childhood, through the rhythm of reciting the Qur’an and the sense that a pattern keeps going beyond what you can actually see or hear. It has always felt calming to me rather than overwhelming: order and repetition as a form of tranquillity.

In this exhibition, a square or rectangle provides a defined edge, but what happens inside it continues to suggest that it wants to move beyond that edge. Nothing is meant to feel fully contained. That is really at the heart of Taking Form: catching something in the process of becoming, rather than presenting it as a finished, settled shape.

— The monumental tapestries demand that viewers move around them before their dual patterns become visible. How important is the viewer’s body — and the act of looking over time — to completing the work?

— It is essential. The tapestries are woven using a ridging technique that produces a second pattern, one that only reveals itself as you physically move around the piece. Standing still in front of it gives you, at most, half of the work.

I want people’s bodies to respond before they have even worked out what they are looking at. The tapestries are hung nearly five metres high, so you have to look upwards, and that alone changes how you experience them. The work is not finished until someone has moved through the space with it.

— Textile has historically been positioned between art, craft and decoration. Does working with tapestry allow you to question those hierarchies, or do you resist that reading altogether?

— My work has always existed between categories rather than within one. Sculpture, painting and architecture have never felt like separate rooms to me. Textile fits naturally into that, rather than arriving as some kind of statement against a hierarchy.

I am not trying to argue craft’s way into fine art. It was already there for me, in the memory of watching baskets being woven by hand, long before I had a gallery context in which to place it. If working with tapestry unsettles that old hierarchy for other people, that is a welcome side effect, but it is not really the reason I am doing it.

— Your work is often discussed through beauty, light and sensory perception. Does it also carry social, political or emotional meanings that might be overlooked when it is described primarily as formal abstraction?

— I think abstraction can hold more than people give it credit for. For me, it allowed me to carry two places — Sylhet and London — without having to choose one over the other or explain myself through a single, tidy story.

There is also something in it about refusing to be boxed into one reading: a pattern that continues to repeat and is universal enough to connect with someone regardless of where they are standing. Underneath the light and colour, there is real emotional weight for me — memory, faith and family — but I would rather people find their own way into that than have it handed to them as a fixed message.

— The linen works allow diluted paint to be absorbed into an unprocessed surface, while the wooden panels hold colour more evenly. What have these materials taught you that your earlier, more reflective surfaces could not?

— They have taught me to let go of a little control. With a reflective surface, colour behaves consistently; you know roughly what you are going to get. Raw linen does not work like that. Diluted acrylic sinks in unevenly depending on how much the weave absorbs, so the material itself makes some of the decisions.

I have found myself watching how two colours behave when they sit next to each other on that surface in a way that I could not with metal or glass. It is a more patient way of working, and it has brought a softness into the work that feels new.

— Your works are titled numerically rather than descriptively. Is this a way of resisting prescribed meanings, and what space do you hope that leaves for the viewer?

— Yes, that is exactly it. A descriptive title tells someone what to see before they have had the chance to see it for themselves. A number does not carry that baggage.

I want the language of the work to remain universal, so that it can connect with someone regardless of what they bring with them, rather than pointing them towards one fixed interpretation. The space that leaves is the whole point. I would rather someone spend time with the pattern, colour and material, and arrive at their own reading of it.

— Looking back at your journey so far, which artists, architects or thinkers have most challenged your understanding of abstraction — and what do you hope this new body of work contributes to that wider conversation?

— Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Josef Albers and Anni Albers were all early influences, alongside figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Lewis deSoto and Bridget Riley, who pushed me towards simplicity and honesty in relation to materials. Louis Kahn’s architecture in Dhaka did something similar from a completely different direction.

What I hope this new work adds to that conversation is craft: bringing something like basket weaving, a tradition I grew up around, into the same room as Minimalism and Islamic geometry without treating it as a lesser reference. Abstraction has room for all of that, and I think this exhibition is my clearest attempt yet to hold it together in one place.