Timo Nasseri
Timo Nasseri’s work uses the means of natural science to open up a perspective for the poetic and fantastic. His practice discusses the infinity and boundlessness, transcendence and metaphysics in a wider context and writing as the beginning and the end. Born in Berlin in 1972 as the son of a German mother and an Iranian father, Nasseri grew up absorbing the influences of two radically different cultures. He describes the Western, Germanic sensibility as rational and logical, whilst stories from his father were imbued with fantasy, imagination, and possibility. In visual terms it may be surprising for Westerners to think of the highly structured art and architecture of the Islamic world as a realm of imagination, and this misunderstanding, these gaps in comprehension, became a drive for the artist in exploring the visual world that emerges when East and West meet.
He started his career as a photographer before turning to sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation.
Nasseri’s work ‘Unknown Letters’ was inspired by the life of the calligrapher Ibn Muqla (885-940, Baghdad), who attempted to add four letters to the Arabic alphabet in 935. These invented letters got lost and were never added to the alphabet, but his system of proportional letters is still valid today. Nasseri began an in-depth research of the Arabic script and alphabet, paying particular attention to its forms and aesthetics. ‘While searching for the letters, it occurred to me that Ibn Muqla might have seen missing letters in the stars.’ So he started looking for the constellations that might have formed the shapes of these letters in the night sky over Baghdad.
In ‘O Time Thy Pyramids’, Nasseri worked on something that can be described as a narrative mathematical theory based on the many-worlds idea in quantum mechanics. It is a series of drawings, which explore the legibility of mathematical language, physics, a theory of everything, possibilities, cartography, fantasy, and the mapping of a universe. Nasseri questions the vocabulary of characters that visually have become so familiar to us by creating his own fantastical worlds of characters, captivating in their minuteness and precision, but also puzzling to the observer. Intellectually, they reference Jorge Luis Borges’ literary work ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), in which every possible combination of letters and words is preserved in an infinite library and thus all knowledge is represented. As it contains every possible combination, it seems cacophonous and indecipherable. However, it may be that just one deciphering code is missing for a possible translation, similar to the keys needed to understand mathematical formulas. Nasseri is discussing topics like legibility, archiving, and fantastic language in a playful artistic way.
The idea of hidden knowledge, of an inaccessible core that defies translation or notation, is recurrent in Nasseri’s artworks, and revealed through ceaseless and transparent attempts at understanding.