Beyond the Letter: An Exploration of the Asemic Studio+
Journey through Al Hurufiyya, Dada, and Letterism to create innovative language-adjacent work with poet Sascha Akhtar and artist and activist Asim Khairdean.
‘In addition to the inclusion of magical words from foreign languages, a common feature of many grimoires is the use of strange alphabets, ciphers, and signs to represent specific deities, demons, or other hidden forces.’ – Michael Moynihan
Asemic writing has a history of over 1,000 years in various forms, across calligraphic traditions all over the world, and has also become part of modern and avant-garde art movements – from Dada and Letterism to concrete poetry, as well as contemporary art forms such as street art ‘calligraffiti’. As a more recent experimental writing form, in contemporary painting and graphic art, Asemic writing has spread even further, taking in and deconstructing calligraphic traditions of different languages from all over the world.
In this course we will begin the work of defining, skirting, and obliterating the line between poetry and painting, tradition and modern, the occult and the everyday, art and science in your own writing, as we work to produce exciting new poems in this innovative and experimental field.
Alongside the modern and Western movements mentioned above, this course will also take in some of the roots and early techniques of Asemic writing, including 15th Century letter magic, or Hurufi magic, and also explore work from the Al Hurufiyya movement, also known as Al-madrassa al-khattiya fil-fann (‘Calligraphic School of Art’) – a painting movement that began in the 1940s and 50s in North Africa and spread as an abstract and experimental form of calligraphy in painting.
This course will read from and experiment with various forms of inscription at the intersection of writing, drawing, and painting, as we create new work in proximity to language, but not necessarily of it.
Studio+ Courses are an expanded version of our Studios and feature a portfolio of preliminary reading, alongside 4 writing assignments, and some additional bonus features bespoke to each course, such as Zoom sessions, collaborative projects, and inter-disciplinary work. There are no Live Chats on this course. Suitable for UK & International students.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]; conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions, wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, or require any form of adjustment to access our courses, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @didsss
About Sascha Akhtar 
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Sascha Akhtar is a Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Greenwich. She performs internationally, some highlights include the Emirates Festival of Literature 2022 and Rotterdam Poetry Festival 2012. Latest writings appear in the Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press), Of Myths and Mothers anthology 2022, and Lucy Writers Platform. Akhtar has poetry forthcoming with both Intergraphia and Haverthorn Press and a book of translations from Urdu with Oxford University Press (2023).These follow on from six poetry collections, including The Grimoire of Grimalkin, (SALT, 2007), The Whimsy of Dank Ju-Ju (Emma Press 2019), and the innovative tarot deck of poetry Only Dying Sparkles (Zimzalla 2018). Akhtar has been facilitating teachings in magical practice and poetry at the Poetry School exclusively since 2018.
Asim Khairdean is a teacher, artist, and activist. Their current research work is centered on the Hurufiya, the Letterists, and the techniques of post-writing/hypergraphy, super-writing/metagraphy, Asemic writing and situgraphy/psychic workers’ self-organisation.
"I have found the quality of work shared helps me to develop my own ideas and try new forms and structures. This is invaluable."
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