205 x 255mm, 144 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2026

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. Designed by London-based Studio LG—HM, with Urdu typography by Birmingham-based designer Abeera Kamran, the book includes a new typeface developed by her for the large Urdu lettering in the book. The book also includes an essay by Hammad Nasar on the gestation of this project, Kazim's art practice, and the Urdu language-world the artist inhabits.

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.

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