"As I draw and shape these forms, an invitation is made, it emerges. An ‘entering into’ takes place. A centering. Scale, presence, human, and otherwise, External is internal and internal is external. That which expires and that which is eternal, a simultaneity, within and without."
Self Similar, a large-scale and immersive, site-specific land work by American artist Jim Denevan was a part of the inaugural edition of the Department of Culture and Tourism's new Public Art Abu Dhabi initiative, Manar Abu Dhabi. The city-wide light art exhibition curated by Reem Fadda, Director of Abu Dhabi Culture Programming and Cultural Foundation and Artistic Director of Public Art Abu Dhabi, and Alia Zaal Lootah, Manar Abu Dhabi Curator, featured 35 site-specific artworks by local and international artists.The ephemeral work, sited on the city's Fahid Island, where city and desert are flanked by the Arabian sea, formed a prominent, new landmark that spanned an area of nearly a square kilometer and rises majestically to a height of 27 meters. Among the largest works of land art ever made, Self Similar, which began as a single circle drawn with a stick in the sand, is at once grand and delicate. The monumental yet temporary installation is formed of 19 concentric rings of 448 pyramids and mounds that expand outward and upward in a mandala pattern. At dusk each evening more than a thousand solar lanterns came to light one by one, adding to the citv's ambient light, casting delicate shadows and a transformative and unifying warm glow on each of the individual volumes of sand in the composition