Itʼs not about getting lost in translation but about translating what is lost

Navid Nuur, who is currently a guest at Villa Kamogawa as a cooperation scholarship holder with the support of the Mondriaan Fund/Netherlands, will be showing an exhibition at the art-space “soda” in Kyoto.  

The work of Dutch-Iranian artist Navid Nuur explores the in-between — 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 — 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 — 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) — 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 experiencepart 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 — 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 — sung, written, typed, or printed — 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.