Edited by Rose Issa and Bob Annibale

This catalogue accompanies the 2023 exhibition at Brunei Gallery, SOAS London. It showcases three generations of artists from Iran and the Arab world, a few exceptional contemporary calligraphers, but mainly those only occasionally incorporating the written word in their works today.

These artists, from different backgrounds and possessing diverse styles, take inspiration from their own culture; they use the morphology of letters and phonemes, the rhymes and rhythms of calligraphy, abstracting words into pictures and thoughts into images.

The result over the past six decades has been the creation of an alternative and original approach to modernism and contemporary art, while representing the birth of new and different aesthetics. The exhibition also includes some examples of early calligraphy from SOAS Library.