Lying within the Western Al Hajar Mountains on the UAE’s east coast, Hatta’s landscape has long been a threshold that oscillates between the urban and the rural.

Within these mountains, Emirati artist Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim once recounted a story about taking fellow artist Hassan Sharif to see a circle he had created on the ground by overturning rocks, revealing their whiter sides against the sand. Sharif told him he had made a work of “land art.”

This anecdote, and countless others, asserts that there is a rich history of artistic practices that aims to amplify the land and subvert preconceptions about the landscapes of the Arabian Peninsula. It is within this continuum that Shaikha Al Mazrou’s practice has emerged and to which the artwork that she has conceived for Hatta’s Leem Lake belongs.

Thresholds are rarely and deliberately stopped at, they are passed through without much attention. In Hatta’s case, this long inhabited threshold offers a diverse landscape tapestry of natural crags, troughs, veins of sedimentary formations, agricultural fields, along with the deep reservoir of knowledge required to cultivate them.

To encourage us to walk deliberately through Hatta’s landscapes, rousing our curiosity about our collective natural heritage and its continued transformations, Al Mazrou tenuously embeds five red discs into the earth, sometimes vertically, and at other times horizontally, as the discs sometimes negotiate with the landscape’s intricacies and idiosyncrasies, and at other times amplify them. Strategically located along a hiking path, each disc invites a different interpretation from the people interacting with it: They become beacons, drawing the visitor closer; portals through which the visitor is invited to be fully immersed within the landscape, and places that invite pause, directing the view towards the wider landscape within which Leem Lake is embedded.

Through Almazrou’s artwork, visitors are encouraged to unearth forgotten or overlooked aspects of Hatta, and to consider the physical remnants, cultural artifacts, and oral histories associated with the landscape. To borrow from Munif, Al Mazrou asks us to see these landscapes as “something of a miracle” that inspires us to reflect on our place within the historical continuum and instill a sense of stewardship and preservation for the landscape's cultural and historical significance.

Deliberate Pauses is Dubai’s largest site-specific art installation and part of a long-term collaboration between Alserkal Arts Foundation and Dubai Culture & Arts Authority.