Our name
We needed a name for the work of making one world legible to another. Our studio's name says this in two languages.
Tîr تیر
Persian for Mercury — the messenger planet, named for the figure who crosses between worlds and makes each comprehensible to the other.
The studio translates between institutions and the people they are meant to serve. Between what an artwork looks like and what it means to someone who cannot see it. Between a commitment to inclusion and the daily reality of a gallery, a front desk, a publication. Tîr names the one who carries things across.
In Farsi, the circumflex marks a long vowel just like the macron does in te reo Māori.
Aho
A word in te reo Māori with four meanings that resist separation. Radiant light, the weft thread in weaving, a cast fishing line, and a medium for knowledge between realms.
The light is the thread is the line is the transmission.
Writing an image description for an artwork is radiant attention. It is built by passing back and forth across the work, making pattern. It requires patience. And it carries knowledge from the visible to the non-visible. Light, weft, cast line, medium.
The divinatory meaning is personal. Nabil's family carries healing lineages from Shiraz and Yazd in Iran: animal healers on his father's side, prophetic dreamers on his mother's. That inheritance lives quietly inside the name.
The space between
Two words, standing close enough to touch.
The spacing came from Hēmi Kelly (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tahu-Ngāti Whaoa), a friend of the studio and one of Aotearoa's foremost te reo Māori translators and language revitalisers. His work includes translating Witi Ihimaera into te reo Māori and creating the Everyday Māori platform. His advice was cultural and structural: keep the two words apart to honour each language, and let the relationship between them stay visible.
The studio works to ensure that disability, inclusion and situated cultural knowledge are equally honoured and held together. Scholarly rigour and embodied artistic practice, kept in proximity. The weft crosses the warp. The pattern comes from the unique nature of each relationship.
Toi rongoā · هنر شفا · Healing art
Art becomes medicine when it reaches the people it was made for. An exhibition that a blind visitor can inhabit, a collection whose image descriptions carry the essence and weight of the work, a gallery whose programming welcomes artists with disability as practitioners — these are acts of repair.
We are actively looking to work with grassroots community arts groups and organisations, especially Indigenous artists with disability across Aotearoa, Australia and the Great Ocean. These things build at the pace of relationships.