Mehrdad Aref-Adib

On the right, my first English book in Iran: Look, Listen & Learn! by LG Alexander.

It places me firmly in the 1970s, when English education was aspirational, modern and visually bold. The red cover, the playful figures sliding along a zig-zag Ls, the command verbs, look, listen, learn, all signal movement, progress and an invitation into another world.

For many of my generation, this was more than a textbook. It marked an early point of entry. English suggested access to elsewhere, to futures not yet fully formed. Language was something to be acquired and practised. Progress meant adding words, rules and a growing sense of familiarity.

And then there is heech (nothing in Persian) on the left. Parviz Tanavoli’s sculpture was born out of resistance. He describes the artistic environment of the mid-1960s, the schools whose pedagogy he could not believe in, the artists and thinkers loudly importing a new Western “ism” every day, and an elite proudly collecting second-hand ideas, as provoking in him a deep protest. This work, he says, became the voice of that protest.

But it did not stop there. His opposition extended inward, even towards the artists of the Saqqakhana movement with whom he was associated. Tanavoli decided to abandon calligraphy altogether, or at most to reduce it to a single word.

This nothingness, however, was not cynical. Tanavoli is clear about this. It was not a negation, nor a declaration that life amounts to nothing. Instead, heech (nothing) is treated as active, generative and resistant, shaped by friendship, hope and lived experience.

Formally, the sculpture is deceptively simple. Three Persian letters, written in nasta‘liq, the most fluid and lyrical of Persian calligraphic styles, combine to form a single word. Language becomes body. A word becomes weight. Silence takes form.

Seen side by side, the resemblance is hard to ignore. The upright mass of the sculpture echoes the angular rise of the zig-zag Ls on the book cover, as if the early lesson and the later refusal share the same underlying shape.

One object insists on instruction and forward motion. The other emerges from refusal and reduction.

One teaches how to enter the world through language.
The other appears when language has been stripped back to what remains.

Between look, listen, learn and nothing lies a life arc many of us recognise: learning how to speak, migrate and adapt, and later learning how to sit with doubt, memory and what cannot be translated.

Nothing here cancels the other out.
The doorway matters.
So does the pause.

Sometimes progress begins with learning.
Sometimes it deepens by returning to nothing.

© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2025