The Bassam Freiha Art Foundation (BFAF) in Abu Dhabi presents The Choreographer of Letters, a major solo exhibition by renowned Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui. Co-curated by Dr Michaela Watrelot (Head Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the BFAF) and Mahdaoui’s daughter, Molka Mahdaoui, this retrospective celebrates Mahdaoui’s remarkable six-decade career, underscoring his pivotal role in shaping modern Arab art. One will be able to visit the exhibition until 25 January 2026.
Mahdaoui is widely recognised for his innovative transformation of Arabic calligraphy into a universal visual language. By detaching the letter from its literal semantic function, he elevates script into pure abstraction: a choreography of lines, shapes, and gestures that evoke movement, poetry, and sound. This approach has earned him the description of being an international “choreographer of letters” and situates his work at the heart of the Hurufiyya movement in modern art.
The exhibition at BFAF features nearly thirty works spanning the full breadth of Mahdaoui’s practice, from his early experiments in the 1960s to mature works created in recent years. The show displays paintings on varied surfaces such as parchment, vellum, linen, and metal, alongside silkscreen prints and bronze sculptures. Highlights include early canvases from Mahdaoui’s Concretion series, dynamic mixed media works from the Azimuth series, and intricately composed circular compositions that showcase Mahdaoui’s rhythmic interplay of form.
About the artist
Nja Mahdaoui (b. 1937, Tunis) received his early training in painting and art history at the Carthage National Museum (Tunisia). He later pursued his studies at the Accademia Santa Andrea in Rome and the École du Louvre in Paris, and continued his artistic development at the Cité Internationale des Arts with the support of a Tunisian government scholarship.
Although he began as an abstract painter in the 1960s, Mahdaoui soon developed his signature approach to calligraphy: detaching letterforms from literal semantic meaning to explore their expressive, rhythmic, and gestural potential. Rather than encoding words, he uses fragmented and stylised calligraphic signs (which he often calls calligrams or graphemes) to create compositions that feel musical and lyrical.
Mahdaoui’s work has been featured in multiple exhibitions across the world: Arab Presences: Modern Art And Decolonisation: Paris 1908-1988 (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France, 2024); The Future Of Traditions, Writing Pictures Contemporary Art From The Middle East (The Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Bloomsbury, London, UK, 2023); Studio Tolerance (Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany, 2022); and Wasl (solo) (Rafia Gallery, Damascus, Syria, 2011), among many others.
Over the course of his career, Mahdaoui has received several major distinctions, notably the Great Prize for Arts and Letters from the Tunisian Ministry of Culture (2006) and the UNESCO Great Prize for Crafts in the Arab World (2005). His artworks are part of esteemed public collections, such as Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris, France), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha, Qatar), and The British Museum (London, UK), to name a few.
To get more information about The Choreographer of Letters, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
Additionally, you might be interested in visiting Remnants by Kais Salman and exploring the Ras Al Khaimah Art Festival 2026.
