Between Script and Abstraction: Golnaz Fathi in 'Sweeter than Honey'
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
06 January 2026
'Sweeter than Honey. Ein Panorama der Written Art', presented at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, offers an expansive survey of text-based practices from the mid-20th century to the present. From 11 December 2025 to 12 April 2026, this exhibition brings together more than 100 works by over 60 international artists and examines how writing operates beyond linguistic function, becoming image, gesture, rhythm, and political signifier. Across a geographically and culturally wide-ranging selection, script is revealed as both a visual structure and a carrier of memory, identity, and power.
The exhibition’s title, inspired by artist Susan Hefuna’s work Mashrabiya – Knowledge Is Sweeter Than Honey, suggests a sensory and poetic approach to language, one that embraces ambiguity and transformation. Rather than privileging legibility, ‘Sweeter than Honey’ foregrounds the materiality of text: erased, fragmented, abstracted, or ritualised. Writing appears as a field of tension between meaning and form, intimacy and resistance.
Within this context, the work of Golnaz Fathi occupies a particularly resonant position. Trained in classical Persian calligraphy, Fathi has developed a practice that deliberately destabilises the discipline’s strict rules and symbolic authority. Her compositions draw on the visual logic of script while dissolving its semantic clarity, transforming letters into dense, gestural structures that verge on abstraction. The result is a dynamic pictorial language that oscillates between control and spontaneity, tradition and rupture.
Fathi’s work engages with the legacy of calligraphy not as a static heritage but as a living, contested space. By stripping writing of literal readability, she invites viewers to encounter language as emotional force and visual rhythm. Her presence in ‘Sweeter than Honey’ underscores the exhibition’s central proposition: that written art is not merely about what is said, but how meaning is embodied, obscured, and reimagined across cultures and histories.
In April 2026, Opera Gallery Dubai will have an exhibition dedicated on Golnaz Fathi.
