Adili drew inspiration from her childhood education in Iran, where all young children learn the phrase Baabaa Aab Daad, or ‘Father Gave Water’, as a foundational example of elemental letter and sound composition in Persian. B, A, and D are all letters in the first part of the alphabet, and babies from different cultures pronounce these letters as their initial sounds. When her own daughter was a toddler learning multiple languages, Adili was inspired to develop a system of blocks and puzzles within a book, to aid her learning.

The ‘pixellated’ typography of the book is designed by the artist. The wooden cubes can be playfully moved and repositioned across the letters and words embedded in the book. Adili intends the cubes as a modular system for understanding the proportions of letterforms, encouraging a viewer/reader to engage with the fundamentals of the Persian language. The book also includes an English phonetic key for the Persian alphabet and color-coded diagrams that break the sentence down word-by-word.

As part of her research for the project, Adili learned of the Iranian educator Seyyed Abbas Sayyahi, whose legacy is tied to the phrase ‘Father Gave Water’. The book tells the story of Sayyahi, who – according to Adili – drafted the country’s first-grade curriculum and wrote its textbook, and co-founded a system of schools to serve the nomadic population.
Adili was a finalist of Jameel Prize 6 in 2021, and this work resonates with the installation she showed in Jameel Prize: Poetry to Politics, which dealt with the Persian language and the epistolary archive of her father.