Science advisor
Art and science
Artist’s bio
Rana Begum’s work focuses on the interplay between light and colour, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her stone sculptures take inspiration from Oulu’s subarctic light and intricate shapes of its frozen sea to reflect upon the alarming melting rate of both the Baltic Sea and Arctic glaciers.
Begum’s work consists of large pieces of granite and marble, cut and painted to evoke large fragments of broken, glacial ice. One side is painted in silver metallic paint, evoking the colour, texture and light reflections on the surfaces of the ice. The second side has been highly polished to capture the surroundings and movement of people through the square; the edges are sometimes left raw and hammered to correspond with forms of fractured ice.
Kauppurienaukio Square. Photo: Harri Tarvainen.
Placed in the square, and in correlation with the city and its inhabitants, the work invites the viewer to reflect upon this duality, which touches upon concepts of evolution, transformation, loss and permanence. The dialogue between ice, and the stone sourced from a quarry in Ylamaa, speaks directly to the Finnish landscape and further empathises the relation between geological time and the present, rapidly changing environment.
Science advisor
Glaciologist Prof. Alun Hubbard, University of Oulu.
Hubbard is a glaciologist and geophysicist exploring how glaciers and ice sheets are changing, looking at the Arctic and the implications of this change for global sea-level rise and coastal flooding. Hubbard has presented at COP and on award-winning documentaries including BBC’s ‘Frozen Planet ‘, Netflix “Our Planet”, and National Geographic “Chasing Ice”.
Art and science
Rana Begum’s dialogue with Alun Hubbard has been about Hubbard’s research and documentation of the environmental shifts taking place, captured through experience and recordings of Greenland glaciers melting. In one of the videos shown on the BBC’s Frozen Planet, Begum was mesmerized by the sound of the glaciers breaking up due to Arctic melting. The scale of breaking icebergs and how it carried a powerful, visceral presence—violent, loud, and even unsettling, yet at the same time incredibly beautiful in the way it revealed nature in motion. That sense of a monumental shift is very compelling.
Rana Begum. Photo: Kevin Kallombo.
Rana Begum RA (b. 1977, Bangladesh/UK), lives in London.
Recent exhibitions include: Henry More More, Kew Wakehurst, 2026, Whispers on the Horizon, Taipei Biennial, (2026), Reflection, SCAD Museum of Art, (2025), Dappled Light, Mead Gallery & Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, (2022), Concrete , (2023), The Box, (2023), Desert X, (2023). Life is More Important than Art, Whitechapel Gallery, (2023), Urban Impressions, Moody Centre for the Arts, Houston (2022), Infinite Geometry, Wanas Konst, 2021, Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery (2019), Solo show, TATE St Ives (2018), Actions, Kettle’s Yard (2018), Occasional Geometries, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2017), Space Light Colour, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2017), The Space Between, Parasol Unit (2016), 11th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2016).
