Resembling an enormous line of dominoes on the verge of toppling over, Wahat Al Karama (The Oasis of Dignity) is a memorial to fallen Emirati soldiers that sits between the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the country’s armed forces headquarters. Commissioned by Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the installation was created by London-based artist Idris Khan, in collaboration with international art studio UAP. Khan, whose work addresses themes of memory and loss, wanted to make a sculpture that would encourage visitors “to feel and see the fragility of life.” Together with UAP, he conceived 31 standing aluminum slabs, painted different gradations of black, that lean on each other to symbolize unified strength among soldiers. The 75-foot-high forms stretch over 320 feet and are inscribed with Arabic poems and quotations of the United Arab Emirates’ past and present leaders. “The biggest challenge was to make the tablets—even at their massive scale—look as though they were touching gently,” says Khan. “The minute tolerances for such huge cantilevers probably had the engineers in fits!”