Acrylic Fabrication and Printing for Luminous Shadow, Al Ain
Abu Dhabi Art commissions artists to make new work for the emirate’s cultural sites. For the 2025 programme the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi placed commissions across six sites in Al Ain, and Luminous Shadow went up on the lawn at Al Hili Archaeological Park.
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian built it from phrases of Ibn Arabi turned into intertwined letters. Sun Studio cut, printed and finished the acrylic with them.
Project snapshot
- Artwork
- Luminous Shadow
- Artists
- Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian
- Commissioned by
- Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi
- Programme
- Abu Dhabi Art, Artist Commissions in Cultural Sites 2025
- Location
- Al Hili Archaeological Park, Al Ain
- On display
- 19 November 2025 to 26 April 2026
- Material
- Acrylic
- Our scope
- Acrylic fabrication and printing
The brief
A gallery piece is looked at for a minute. A piece standing on a lawn at a heritage site is walked through, leaned on and photographed for months, and it has to look in April the way it looked in November. Luminous Shadow stood outdoors from 19 November 2025 to 26 April 2026.
Sunlight is the problem outdoors in the Gulf, not rain. Pigment on an exposed surface loses its lighter tones first, and a work assembled from dozens of colours reads its own fading as a mistake in the drawing.
Our approach
Every letterform is a separate cut part, and this artwork does not tolerate a part being nearly right. The letters overlap, so the cut edge of one is read against the printed face of the next, and a millimetre of drift in the cut shows as a gap in the line.
The colour was printed onto the acrylic rather than applied over it. UV ink cures as it is laid down, so the colour is bonded into the face of the sheet and there is no coating for six months of sun and dust to lift.
Production detail
Colour agreement across the set is the quiet part of a job like this. Parts are cut and printed in batches, but they end up hanging next to each other in the finished piece, so a batch that drifted would be obvious to anyone standing under the arch.
The edges matter as much as the faces. On a flat cut part seen from below and from the side, the exposed acrylic edge is part of the artwork whether you intended it to be or not.
The result
Luminous Shadow stood on the lawn at Al Hili Archaeological Park through the winter, one of the Al Ain commissions the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi held over to 26 April 2026.
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Send the drawing, the material and the sizes. We cut, print and finish acrylic for artists, fabricators and fit-out contractors.
