Biography
Sasan Nasernia grew up in Tehran surrounded by calligraphy — not as decorative tradition but as living language, as a practice that held together script, image and meaning in a way that Western typography never quite managed. He trained at Azad Art University, earned his BFA, and started his career as a calligrapher and typographic designer. Then he started taking the rules apart. The result is what he calls "Crazy Kufic" — a term that sounds playful but describes something more serious. Kufic is the oldest form of Arabic calligraphy, angular and architectural, designed for stone inscription rather than flowing manuscript. Nasernia goes back to that origin and then destabilises it: letterforms stretched, collapsed, dripped, interlocked, stripped of their semantic content until they stop communicating language and start doing something else entirely. What they start doing is closer to physics than literature. He has described his practice as seeing the world as "a gigantic code where the spoken and written word has a primal influence" — influenced by philosophical notions of chaos versus cosmos, by modern physics, by impermanence as a structural principle rather than a subject. The works borrow from Persian miniature painting and historical iconography while operating in the register of contemporary abstraction. In one mode, text becomes image. In another, the image returns to something that almost reads as text but doesn't quite. The viewer is caught between interpretation and sensation, between the learned response to seeing script and the unfamiliar experience of script that refuses to be read. He has shown at the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennale, the Larnaca Biennale, Mestaria Gallery at Alserkal Avenue, and Kalimat Gallery Dubai. In 2025, he was selected from over 300 submissions for Made in the UAE at JD Malat Gallery. He lives between Dubai and Vancouver.
