The Delfina Foundation
London
2009-2010
The
Delfina Foundation sent Nathaniel Rackowe and Rana Begum on
a two months residency in Beirut, 2009.
Initiated during her residency in Beirut, No.207 (2010)
vigorously pursues the artistic potency of line and colour;
whilst exploring the possibility of reducing complex
elements to their vital parts.
Extracting banal hardware from its utilitarian context,
Begum limited her materials to commercially available
drinking straws, in five standard colors (fluorescent
green, yellow, pink, orange and black). Composed entirely
of glowing lines, the resulting modular superstructure
demonstrates the generative potential of Begum’s
systematic application of the limited vocabulary of
commercially available fluorescent materials.
No.207 is rooted in Rana’s observation of the urban
milieu, the aesthetic possibilities of the city and the
implications of architectural modernism. Renewing her
commitment to serial and rational forms and their
subsequent emphasis of phenomenological strategies,
Rana’s work sets out to transform the overpowering
associations of urban debasement into poetic entities:
No.207’s fluorescent colors evoke Beirut’s
buzzing night scene, and the convoluted modular shapes
recall the chaotic maze of a metropolis.
Dealing with architectural propositions as much as with the
formal possibilities of Minimalism, No.207 is an attempt to
condense the urban experience to its most significant
elements, to abstract analogous visual stimuli and
subsequently articulate them into concrete forms and
lights. Feeding on the architecture of a space, cutting
lines across and reorganising it according to abstract
cartographies, No.207 draws powerful associations between
culture, architecture and design, and reinvents our
relationship to artificial spaces.
