The Alphabet, Before Words

How does a language emerge? Before grammar and words come the body, sound, gesture, sign and matter. This physical origin of communication is the starting point for Phenomenological Alphabets, on view until 4 October 2026 at the Project Space of the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. The exhibition brings together Aya Afaneh, Sarah Afaneh, Sarah Brahim, Amir Hazim, Yoonsik Chico Park and Andrew Riad to explore the relationship between experience, the construction of language and the production of meaning. The project originates with Aya Afaneh, who invites artists from her community whose practices have intersected over time with questions also present in her own work. The starting point is both simple and complex: understanding when a sound becomes a word, a gesture becomes communication, or a sign acquires a shared meaning. Language is therefore considered not as an already established system, but at the moment when it takes shape through voice, movement, symbols and materials. The works approach this investigation from different perspectives. Aya Afaneh uses the body as a tool for producing signs, while Sarah Brahim explores gesture through choreography. In Andrew Riad’s practice, sound, body and movement become materials to be distorted and reinvented. Yoonsik Chico Park instead begins with existing alphabetic characters and the possibility that the same relationship between sound and symbol may acquire different meanings according to context, use and perception. Sarah Afaneh works with the construction of symbols as a means of shifting attention and transforming historical languages, while Amir Hazim explores representations of the body and the reconstruction of our perception of movement. The six artists do not attempt to devise a new common alphabet, but instead examine the processes through which meaning can take shape. Phenomenological Alphabets thus takes language back to its primary elements. A gesture, a sound or a sign can possess its own logic even before becoming part of a shared code: meaning can emerge as the body moves, the voice produces a sound, or matter is transformed into a symbol.