How Medical Director Nazanin Moghbeli Uses Calligraphy as Meditation

Razan Idris

“Lines of words, calligraphy, and blood-flow all mirror each other in the worlds that I straddle.”

During the pandemic, Nazanin Moghbeli spent her working hours as the medical director of the cardiac care unit at Einstein Medical Center, where she was met with weeks of high stress and neverending encounters with sickness and death. But after hours, Moghbeli found solace in her artistry. She tells Al-Bustan, “I stayed sane by stopping in the studio on my way home and working on painting for half an hour before going home”. For Moghbeli, the ink flowing from her bamboo pen to create abstract Faris calligraphy “kept [her] from drowning.”

While past interviews have often touched on the intersection of science and art in Moghbeli’s works, she says, “What I’m most interested in as a thinker and person is how my art helps me process my identity.” As an Iranian-American artist raised in Philadelphia and Tehran, Moghbeli explains, “My relationship to the different parts of myself fluctuate with the political landscape between my two countries”. In the studio, Moghbeli is not only able to dive into those themes but she can freely explore them without feeling pressured to create a solution for her audience. 

Recently, Al-Bustan connected with Moghbeli to talk more about her artistic practice and the role that art plays in her life. 

“I love this ancient tradition of Farsi calligraphy, but I want to get inside it, break it, and put it together in a way that’s mine.”

What does your studio practice look like?

I start my studio day working on my calligraphy homework from the Persian master Ostadh Ali Ghertasi, who is based in Stockholm. I’m not the best student, but I always do my homework of recreating Farsi letters with my bamboo pen and ink. It’s a very meditative practice focused on correct proportions and technique, and it’s a great way to warm up my hand for about an hour on paper. Then I use the same paper but let my hand do whatever it wants, using some of those movements and techniques and feelings from the calligraphy, but with free form and without intention, making drawings and setting the timer for 90 minutes without being caught up in judgment. What I’ve learned is this is my way of saying that I love this ancient tradition of Farsi calligraphy, but I want to get inside it, break it, and put it together in a way that’s mine.

What calligraphic style are you trained in? Are there artists you see your artwork as being in conversation with? 

The artist who influences me the most is my mother, because she’s a professional calligrapher in the Nastaliq style and she raised me learning Nastaliq. I hesitate to say I’m trained in Nastaliq calligraphy rather than studying it as a novice, since I haven’t gone through the proper training pathway myself with all the involved examinations. Instead, I studied painting at Swarthmore and I was drawn there to the visual language of Western abstract expressionist painters, and that’s how I interpret Farsi calligraphy.

“I use my mother’s discarded calligraphic works in my own pieces, and that’s my way of both connecting with and rejecting her approach.”

I don’t look heavily at modern calligraphers for inspiration, although I do love the work of the Paris-based artist Bahman Panahi. Instead, I enjoy coming across contemporary American artists at the MOMA, who help me anchor my ideas of form and composition where I live here in the United States. I use my mother’s discarded calligraphic works in my own pieces, and that’s my way of both connecting with and rejecting her approach. I am in this very rich place of conflict and clashing while also respecting, bringing in, and paying homage to my mother and my heritage.

You've done both landscape and abstract art in the past. What visual modes are you drawn to in the future?

I’m very interested in creating a visual world of Iranian music. We have seven different musical modes, and each of those modes evokes a different atmosphere for me. I want to translate those acoustics into visuals via painting. I'm excited about that because I draw heavily on Iranian poetry and music in my studio practice. I studied music for many years with different Iranian masters such as Ostad Hossein Omoumi, and I’m also a student of Persian poetry. I incorporate both of those in my work more than visual inspiration.

When I listen to certain Iranian music, I feel like someone is opening a door in my brain. Like, here I am in Philly speaking English with American friends - and the music opens a door to Iran in a whole different place that gives me the inspiration for my artwork. The sensation that does that might be smell for someone else, or touch - for me music is a shortcut to putting myself in a different place. It’s incredibly powerful because there’s infinite material to access.

What do you see as the relationship between art and healing from physical and emotional pain, especially as a mother?

I think art creates a space of making and doing and being which puts you in the moment. Art closes everything else out, and you enter into the process of “flow” described by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where you enter into what you’re doing and everything else falls away. This doesn’t have to come from painting - what matters is entering a mental space where you’re in the present and all that matters is what you’re making. I think this healing is especially important for medical workers, and so I host art workshops for clinicians.

I encourage my kids to engage in those intense creative moments which place us in the present. It was my fifteen year old child who pushed me to show my latest exhibit “Unquiet Fury” at InLiquid, which is about women in Iran before and after the death of Mahsa Amini. I had told myself that it was not my place to talk about what was happening in Iran because I’m not physically there - but my child told me I have a responsibility as an artist to share my work. In the end, I was happy to give people an opportunity to think about what they don’t normally do - how the U.S. is implicated in what happens in Iran today. And that’s what I love to explore in my art.

Razan Idris is a Sudanese-American PhD candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania and the curator of the #SudanSyllabus, working on a project tentatively titled The Colors of the Earth: Blackness in 1930s Egypt.