Timo Nasseri’s Unknown Letters was inspired by the life of the well-known calligrapher Ibn Muqla (885-940, Baghdad), who attempted to add four new letters to the Arabic alphabet. These four letters were lost, but Muqla’s system of proportional scripts is still valid today. According to this, the proportion of each letter of the alphabet is determined by a fixed number of rhomboid (diamond-shaped) dots, calculated both mathematically and visually. Letters are always in relation to one another, written in one of the six proportional scripts: naskh, thuluth, muhaqqaq, rayhani, tawqi’, and riqa’.

“Ibn Muqla might have based the shape of the lost letters on the stars,” says Nasseri, who researched the possible constellations of the night sky over Baghdad back in the 10th century. Based on these, he created his own images of the four letters, which are presented in the niches of the Planetarium. If Arabic calligraphy is based on a precise demarcation of space, this work adds a dimension of time, linking an imagined version of the sky over the Middle East centuries ago with the sky we ourselves can observe over Europe today. And if letters usually ornament monuments, Unknown Letters is a monument to calligraphy itself.


Timo Nasseri was born in 1972 to an Iranian father and German mother and now lives in Berlin. He explores the material and immaterial dimensions of mathematics, architecture, geometry, Islamic patterning, and Farsi culture.


Location of the work on Google Maps