Rumi’s timeless poetry inspires Tanweer Festival in Mleiha desert’s ageless sands
- Last updated: November 1, 2025 | 11:36
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
The second edition of Tanweer Festival, set against the backdrop of Mleiha desert (beginning November 1 and lasting May-end), presents a collection of 11 large scale artworks that will enliven the festival grounds with unique and immersive offerings. Eleven Emirati artists, UAE-based artists and international artists will take part in the event highlighting heritage and the influence of nature to connect past, present and future, through installations.
This year’s festival, themed ‘What You Seek Is Seeking You’, is inspired by the timeless wisdom of 13th-century poet Rumi. He is the guiding inspiration of the theme, which is adapted and interpreted by the artists. Their works collectively transform the festival into an aesthetic exploration where art, nature and creativity converge and history, memory and poetry intersect, to create an immersive desert art experience.
Each contributing installation resonates deeply with the festival’s essence of connection, reflection and cultural heritage. Together, they extend beyond visual expression, creating spaces for dialogue, introspection and communal experience, in harmony with Mleiha’s ancient landscape. HYBYCOZO, the collaborative studio of artists Serge Beaulieu and Yelena Filipchuk based in Los Angeles, explores how geometry can shape not only objects, but experiences.
Their work, ‘Nexus’, a golden, honeycomb-vaulted structure with two adjacent units, resembles a faceted cave. Its filigreed patterns shift the atmosphere of both interior and exterior spaces. At night, light animates the structure, giving it an ephemeral and living feel.
South Korean artist Seo Young Deok, renowned for his hyper-realistic, life-size sculptures made entirely from welded chains salvaged from industrial machinery and bicycles, is represented with his work ‘Meditation 1554’. The sculpture - a pensive male head with closed eyes - takes its name from the 1,554 metres of rusted bike chains used to create it.
Dutch fiber artist Milla Novo creates large-scale, hand-knotted macramé wall hangings and carpets that merge South American Mapuche heritage with contemporary design. ‘Ancestral Whispers’ is her first large-scale installation featuring 20 hand-knotted fiber panels suspended vertically, inviting viewers to walk among them and even try out a centrally suspended swing inside the installation.
In ‘Whispers of Truth’, Emirati artist Juma Alhaj explores the journey of seeking truth through a sculptural installation inspired by quotation marks. The work features eight monumental, inverted quotation marks made of mild steel, clustered together to symbolise how thoughts, shaped by time and experience, crystallise into perception.
One Third Studio - Amna Bin Bishr, Duna Ajlan and Dania Ajlan - is a trio of designers dedicated to preserving Emirati culture through their work. Their outdoor installation ‘Reflections’ reimagines a cave as a mirror of the self. Inspired by Mleiha’s ancient caves and the nearby Faya Palaeolandscape - named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025 - the work meditates on caves as timeless sanctuaries of refuge and introspection.
Rawdha Al Ketbi, an Emirati visual artist from Abu Dhabi who often works with found materials and memories sourced from abandoned places, explores themes of time, loss, and transformation. Her installation ‘The Sediment of Time’ comprising over 100 spheres, evokes the motion of water and draws inspiration from Mleiha’s desert mountains, which were once the floor of an ancient sea. Shabir Mir, a multifaceted Pakistani artist, sculptor and calligrapher based in Sharjah, presents ‘Word Garden’, a large-scale installation exploring Arabic letters. Arranged at varying heights, the letters rise like plants reaching skyward, reflecting the organic flow of Arabic script, its curves echoing nature’s forms. At their peak, the letters form the word “Passion” in response to the festival’s theme ‘What You Seek Is Seeking You’.
UAE-based Indian ceramic artist Pranoti Karajgi weaves memory and history through clay in her immersive installation ‘Threading Time - A Journey through Beads’. It consists of five monumental arches, each echoing a distinct era from Mleiha’s past. As visitors walk through, the arches become a living necklace, connecting artisans, travellers, and the present. The artist brings the bead back home to the desert, where stories of trade and craftsmanship once began. Ranim Orouk is a Syrian artist, designer and architect based in the UAE, known for her intricate explorations of nature and geometry. In ‘Knots of Poetry: Sitting with Rumi’, she creates an immersive installation inspired by a verse from the poet “Be like a tree and let the dead leaves fall”.
Modular wooden benches emerge from the sand like fallen leaves in a landscape. Some are topped with carpets, others engraved with abstracted patterns and calligraphy, or layered with sand. The work explores release, renewal, and transformation through poetic form and material. Talin Hazbar showcases ‘Radii’, a structure that focuses on creating an immersive journey through material representations, time, memory and meaning. The radial structure aims to highlight significant archaeological findings from the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, Iron, and Late Pre-Islamic periods. Through ‘Radii’, visitors are invited on a journey through time and excavation - an experience that reflects the continual act of revealing and uncovering.
UAE-based Iranian architect and designer Neda Salmanpour uses a research-driven approach. Her modular light installation ‘Nadd’ - first shown in 2023 - draws inspiration from dune lines, with each piece glowing warmly to evoke movement. Reimagined for Tanweer Festival, ‘Nadd’ is now housed in a dark cylindrical pavilion in the desert. A hidden structure lifts the sand, bringing the lamps chest high. Each lamp feels like a future relic, merging past and future, memory and possibility, forming a quiet, timeless presence in the landscape.