Lawrie Shabibi is thrilled to announce that Arts AlUla have unveiled the latest major public art project titled 'Safar' at AlUla’s International Airport, featuring over 64 artworks by 24 Saudi and international artists, including Shaikha Al Mazrou.
Shaikha Al Mazrou presents two large-scale sculptures titled 'When Mountains are Domesticated' (2022) which reference local rock engravings in a deep brick orange resin. Al Mazrou’s practice is anchored in the history of art, borrowing formally from minimalism and intellectually from conceptual art. Influenced by artists from the Modernist and Bauhaus Movements, Al Mazrou uses the formal aspects of minimalism to engage with a current fascination with materiality in art. Al Mazrou’s sculptural experimentations and investigations are expressions of materiality — articulations of tension and the interplay between form and content, as well as an intuitive, keenly felt understanding of materials and their physical properties.
Spanning both the Executive Terminal and the Commercial Terminal, Safar highlights and celebrates AlUla’s cultural legacy, natural wonders and community and includes works by artisans of AlUla’s Madrasat Addeera Art and Design Centre, opened by Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) to train and upskill the next generation of creatives.
Safar – meaning travel in Arabic – is a fitting name for this important collection of sculpture, photography, textiles, paintings, and design pieces found at the gateway to AlUla. AlUla has long been a place of artistic journey: a historic hub of cultural transfer, which is now being revived as an oasis of art and creativity. A long-standing place of passage, AlUla has always welcomed traders, merchants and pilgrims who have – for millennia – portrayed their experiences of AlUla's spectacular cultural landscape through literature and art.
