A collaboration between artist Ali Kazim and curator Hammad Nasar, this book opens up the Urdu alphabet for English and Urdu readers alike, setting it alongside Kazim’s gaze into South Asia – its flora and fauna, histories, legends, and everyday life on its streets. Urdu alphabet books or qaidas sit in the school bags of millions of children in the sub-continent, and among its diaspora.

With its attention to design, typography and reprographics, this artist’s book takes the Urdu alphabet on a journey of the imagination, connecting it to the spaces within which it lives, while chronicling an extraordinary art practice over two decades. The book includes an essay by Hammad Nasar on the gestation of this project, Kazim’s art practice, and the Urdu language-world the artist inhabits. Ali Kazim lives in Lahore and his work is collected by museums around the world including Tate in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Sharjah Art Foundation, Qatar Museums and numerous others.

Known internationally for his enigmatic, tactile paintings, Kazim draws on and adapts a range of techniques from South Asia and beyond – the Mughal miniature to render fine detail in his portraits; East Asian wash techniques, for unusual depth and texture in his watercolour surfaces; and the quasi-scientific style of the East India Company School, which he suffuses with a deeply poetic timbre in his depictions of nature. Kazim’s world is shaped by a culture and language that has been shared across South Asia over centuries.