Deliberate Pauses: Shaikha Al Mazrou’s Five Red Discs in the Hajar Mountains

ART & CULTURE · HATTA

Reading time: 9 min

Dubai builds landmarks that announce themselves. Deliberate Pauses does the opposite. Shaikha Al Mazrou spent two years walking the Hajar Mountains at dawn before placing five red steel discs along the trails at Leem Lake, and the whole point of them is that from most angles you barely see them at all.

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The default setting for a landmark in Dubai is visibility. Height, scale, illumination, a silhouette that reads from the motorway. It is a city that has been extraordinarily successful at building things you cannot miss.

Which is what makes Deliberate Pauses such an unusual object to have come out of the same cultural system.

Unveiled on 21 April 2025 in the mountains around Leem Lake in Hatta, it consists of five circular steel sculptures, each five metres in diameter, set into a hiking trail through the Hajar range. It is billed as Dubai’s largest site-specific art installation, which is accurate, and it is also among the quietest things the emirate has commissioned. The discs are finished in red, but their frames are left untreated so they weather into the iron-oxidised rock around them. Approach from the wrong angle and you will walk past one.

It was made by the Emirati artist Shaikha Al Mazrou and curated by the architect and academic Faysal Tabbarah, commissioned by the Alserkal Arts Foundation with Dubai Culture.

What is actually out there

Five discs, five metres across, positioned along the trail at points the artist selected on foot. Some sit vertically, standing in the path like openings. Others lie horizontally, set into the ground.

The material logic is precise. Red is the loudest colour you could choose in a landscape of grey and ochre rock, and it is also, in the Hajar Mountains, a colour already present, because the geology here is heavily iron-oxidised. Al Mazrou’s frames are deliberately left raw so that they oxidise too, drawing the sculptures into the rock while the red faces continue to signal. Her own description of the intent is exact: “I wanted it to camouflage with the landscape and allow the red to push through.”

Beneath each frame is concealed solar-powered lighting, which comes on after sunset. During the day the discs read as apertures. At night they become markers.

The curatorial framing describes the five as working in three registers at once: beacons that draw a visitor closer, portals to step through and be surrounded by the landscape, and pauses that stop you and turn your attention outward to the wider view. That is more than usually accurate as a description of what a circle does when you put it in a mountain range.

The two years before the steel

The making is the part that deserves attention, because it explains why the work reads as belonging rather than being deposited.

Deliberate Pauses took roughly two years to realise, and most of that was not fabrication. Al Mazrou hiked the trails repeatedly at dawn, choosing positions on foot, then surveyed the shortlisted sites from above using drones to test how each one sat within the larger topography. The project involved site studies and archaeological consultation before anything was installed.

It is an unusually patient sequence for public art, and it is the reason the result sits so well. The landscape was studied first and the object was shaped to fit what was found.

The title works on both levels, which is a neater piece of naming than it first appears. It refers to the pauses in Al Mazrou’s own process, and to the literal pauses a walker takes on a climb. The work is called what it does.

Shaikha Al Mazrou, and why she keeps getting these commissions

Al Mazrou has become, quietly, the most consistently commissioned sculptor working in UAE public space.

Born in 1988, she studied at the College of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Sharjah before taking an MFA at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London, in 2014, where she won the MFA Student Prize. She taught sculpture at Sharjah and is now a visiting assistant professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Her practice is built on geometric abstraction and colour theory, worked through industrial materials, principally steel and copper, with a stated interest in tension, weight and balance. The lineage runs through minimalism, conceptual art and the Bauhaus, and it is a genuinely rigorous body of work rather than a decorative one.

The commission list explains the trust placed in her here. The Plinth for the Expo 2020 Dubai public art programme in 2021. Measuring Physicality of Void at Desert X AlUla in 2022, which is the most obvious precedent for Deliberate Pauses, since it dealt with exactly this problem of placing precise geometry into unruly desert terrain. Red Stack at Frieze Sculpture in London in 2022. The Aichi Triennale in 2025. She won the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize in 2020 and has been shortlisted for the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Richard Mille Art Prize, and her work sits in the collections of Art Jameel, the Dubai Collection, the Royal Commission for AlUla and the Columbus Museum of Art.

She is also one of the five artists behind Union of Artists, the emirate’s first permanent landmark public commission at Al Hudaiba, and she has a permanent work at Huna Sculpture Park on Jumeira Street. Across the three most significant public sculpture initiatives Dubai has produced this decade, Al Mazrou appears in all of them.

Faysal Tabbarah, and the idea underneath the work

The curator is not incidental here, and the connection is worth drawing because nobody else seems to have drawn it.

Faysal Tabbarah is an architect and academic at the American University of Sharjah, and in 2023 he curated Aridly Abundant, the UAE National Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The argument of that pavilion was that arid landscapes are not empty, depleted or waiting to be improved, but are abundant on their own terms, and that architecture in this region should proceed from that premise.

Deliberate Pauses is that thesis built at full scale in a mountain range.

The work sits lightly on Hatta. It supplies no shade, no facility, no programme. What it does is direct attention: it stops you, frames a view, and asks you to notice a landscape you were walking through on the way to somewhere else. The claim being made is that the mountains are already sufficient, and that the correct role of the intervention is to make you look at them.

Tabbarah’s description of the work is that it “invites reflections about place, connection and wonder.” The curatorial text reaches for Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and its insistence on seeing the landscape as something close to a miracle. Both are consistent with the pavilion, and both explain why the sculptures are as reticent as they are.

The trilogy this belongs to

Deliberate Pauses is the second of three commissions the Alserkal Arts Foundation is delivering with Dubai Culture, each with its own curator and its own site.

Al Shindagha Historic District, curated by Munira Al Sayegh, ran under the title Lamma | Coming Together, built around workshops, talks, oral histories and walks before producing a work. Its installation, Resonance by graphic designer Maryam Namvar and architect Neda Salmanpour, uses three suspended metal panels that respond visually and audibly to the neighbourhood around them.

Al Quoz Creative Zone is curated by Sumayya Vally, the architect behind Counterspace and the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, working with the district’s industrial heritage and creative present.

Hatta is Tabbarah’s.

Read as a set, it is a smarter structure than a single commissioning brief would have produced. Three curators with genuinely different practices, three sites with nothing in common beyond being in Dubai, and no attempt to impose a house style. It is the same distributed logic Dubai Culture has applied elsewhere in its public art programme, and it keeps producing better results than a centralised approach would.

Hatta, and what is happening around the artwork

Context matters here, because the mountains are the focus of serious investment.

Hatta is Dubai’s exclave in the Hajar Mountains, and since the Hatta Master Development Plan was approved in October 2021 it has been the subject of a Dh3.6 billion development programme. Delivered so far: the Hatta Dam Amphitheatre, a 610-metre structure climbing 37 metres in a walk of around 17 minutes, a new school with 44 classrooms and a 416-seat theatre, three farms including a hydroponic facility, a 15km mountain biking trail and a 10km hiking route. Under construction as of late 2025: a 213-home Emirati neighbourhood, a Hatta Majlis and a 1,000-capacity wedding hall.

The stated ambition is that Hatta should become a global model for harmony between people and nature.

Which is what makes the commission so well judged. Deliberate Pauses is an artwork whose entire argument is that the landscape is already enough, sited in a landscape receiving a Dh3.6 billion programme of tourism and residential investment. The two sit together comfortably, and the artwork earns its place in the programme precisely because it makes the case for restraint from the inside.

And the work is built to hold its own as Hatta grows around it. Sited on foot over two years and tuned to the rock it stands in, five discs placed this carefully will reward every walker who comes up the trail to find them.

Visiting

Deliberate Pauses sits on the hiking trails around Leem Lake in Hatta, roughly ninety minutes from central Dubai by car, and it is encountered on foot rather than viewed from a road.

Go early. The discs were sited during dawn walks and the low light is when the red does its best work against the rock. The concealed solar lighting means they also read after dark, which is worth knowing if you are staying overnight rather than driving out and back.

Treat it as a walk that happens to contain art rather than an art destination with a walk attached. That is what the work is asking for, and the sequencing of the five along the route makes considerably more sense at walking pace.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

This commission took the harder and more rewarding route. It could have been a single large sculpture at the lake, visible from the road, engineered for photographs, with a car park and a sign.

What exists instead is five quiet objects distributed along a walk, made by an artist who spent two years learning the ground before deciding where they went, curated by someone whose central professional argument is that arid landscapes are already abundant. The discs mostly disappear. When they do announce themselves, it is to make you look at something that was there before they arrived.

For a city that has built its global reputation on the unmissable, commissioning something this reticent is a genuinely interesting decision, and a more confident one than another landmark would have been.

The mountains do not need the art. That is precisely what the art is saying.