The work of Dutch-Iranian artist Navid Nuur explores the in-betweenーbetween language and image, presence and absence, viewer and environment. In his upcoming exhibition in Kyoto, Nuur turns his attention to language as a form of navigation, a poetic tool for understanding place, identity, and disconnection.

Titled Itʼs not about getting lost in translation but about translating what is lost, the exhibition reflects Nuurʼs long-standing engagement with text as both material and medium. Deeply influenced by his personal experience of dyslexia, Nuur has developed an idiosyncratic form of writing and typography he calls Dislectika free, open-source font that embraces the typo as a space of creative potential. His handwriting, equally expressive and intuitive, becomes a visual system of its own: an inward form of calligraphy that resists fixed meaning.

In this Kyoto presentation, language becomes a site of both intimacy and distance. Nuur uses writing not to explain, but to connectーthrough letters, poems, and gestures that are spread across the city like echoes. Central to the show is a text-based poster created specifically for Kyoto. Neither an announcement nor a conventional artwork, it carries no date, no event, only a constellation of image and text. These posters will quietly appear in bars, shops, and homesーplaces where such ephemera are often kept for years. Designed to age with the city, the poster becomes part of its seasonal rhythm, subtly embedding itself into the everyday fabric of Kyoto.

Another key element in the exhibition is Nuurʼs use of 色紙 (shikishi)ーthe traditional Japanese square boards often used for autographs and short messages. These will serve as carriers for his own handwritten poems about the city, linking his personal impressions with a familiar and culturally resonant form. In Nuurʼs hands, the shikishi become small windows into language as lived experience part letter, part landscape.

In the garden of the venue, visitors will encounter a site-responsive, text-based performance work. A simple envelope, available for those who enter, unlocks a silent correspondence embedded in the environmentーwaiting to be completed by the visitorʼs presence. A letter addressed to a local Kyoto record shop further extends the showʼs exploration of sound, language, and shared frequencies: a poetic exchange between strangers, where text becomes music and music becomes message.

Across all its formsーsung, written, typed, or printedーthis exhibition views language not as a tool of clarity, but as a living field of gestures: vulnerable, imperfect, and endlessly generative. It invites the viewer not just to read, but to listen, to sense, to carry fragments home.

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Kazuhito Tanaka (soda) sodakyotojpn (@) gmail.com

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Supported by Mondriaan Fund, Goethe-Institut Kyoto