In a quiet, book-lined flat overlooking Istanbul’s Bosphorus, the air is filled with a sense of deliberate grace. Along the walls, sweeping curves of Persian nastaliq script merge with bold, gestural mark-making. Some pieces are centuries old, delicate folios on handmade paper, their ink still resonant after 400 years. Others are vast canvases splashed with acrylic, neon, and digital projection, each letterform fractured into abstraction.
This is the private collection of Dr. Leila Aram, a cultural historian whose life’s work has been to trace the evolution of calligraphic art from manuscript tradition to contemporary experimentation.
“Letters have always been visual,” she says, standing before a dynamic projection piece by Iranian artist Nima Soltani, in which illuminated Arabic script dissolves into pure geometry. “They hold meaning even when you can’t read them.”
Aram’s collecting journey began in her twenties, when, as a graduate student at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she purchased her first artwork – a small 19th-century Ottoman calligraphy panel. “It cost me half a month’s rent,” she recalls, “but it was the first time I felt history living in my hands.”
Since then, her collection has grown to encompass over 150 works, spanning Islamic calligraphy, Japanese shodo, and modernist reinterpretations by artists from Beirut to Seoul. It is this cross-cultural approach that makes her holdings so distinctive. “The through-line,” she explains, “is gesture. Every mark is a physical trace of a human hand and thought.”
One of her most prized acquisitions is a digital print from the Spectral Letters series by Moroccan-French artist Samir El Yazid, in which fragments of kufic script are algorithmically rearranged into flowing chromatic patterns. “It’s a direct conversation between the 9th century and the 21st,” Aram says.
Beyond collecting, Aram is an active philanthropist. She has endowed fellowships for young artists studying traditional ink techniques, funded preservation work for fragile manuscripts in Central Asia, and serves on the advisory board of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. In 2024, she established Glyph Project2030, a non-profit dedicated to archiving and digitizing endangered scripts around the world, with both linguistic and artistic aims.
Visitors to her home often notice how she curates by rhythm rather than chronology—pairing, for example, a 17th-century Safavid panel with a contemporary Japanese work by Yuichi Inoue, letting the lines converse across centuries and languages. “Calligraphy is music you can see,” she says. “I like to arrange my collection so you can hear it.”
Pimlico Wilde’s François Zilb notes that Aram’s focus has contributed to a growing institutional interest in calligraphic abstraction as a global art form, saying “She’s bridging gaps between what has been traditionally considered ‘decorative’ and what belongs in the canon of modernism.”
When asked what drives her acquisitions, Aram’s answer is simple: “The mark survives the maker. That’s what I’m preserving—the living trace of someone’s hand, carrying across time. I hope to keep this art form alive, and help oversee its rebirth.”
