BAYNAHUMĀ: Between Formation and Fragmentation

Baynahumā explores the Arabic letter as a form in continual transition between formation and fragmentation, legibility and abstraction, presence and absence. Drawing on a documented corpus of historical Kufic alifs, the work traces the letter as it moves from line to pixel to point, fragments and reconnects, disappears and returns.

At the core of the work is reversibility: there is no fixed beginning or end, and no single direction of transformation. A line can disperse into fragments, while fragments can gather again into form.

Rather than treating fragmentation as loss, Baynahumā considers how a letter can transform without losing its memory, allowing historical form and contemporary visual language to coexist in a continuous state of becoming.

Nada Abdallah is a designer, artist, researcher, and educator based in the UAE. She teaches design at the Academy of Visual Arts, University of the Arts Sharjah, and serves as President of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). Her practice spans typography, visual identity, exhibition design, and research, with a particular interest in Arabic letterforms, cultural memory, and transforming historical visual systems into contemporary forms. She is also the founder and director of the FiftyFifty International Student Traveling Exhibition and the Bilarabic Design Festival.