A review of In other wor(l)ds 2018, Muzzumil Ruheel, Art Dubai
Elena Hartmann
There is a tendency in contemporary sculpture to speak about material, scale, and space, but rarely about language. Language is usually left to literature, to text-based art, or to conceptual practices that treat words as statements. What makes Muzzumil Ruheel’s project In other wor(l)ds particularly compelling is that it does not treat language as text, nor as image, nor as symbol. Instead, it treats language as structure — something that can stand, lean, hang, drag, balance, and occupy space in the same way a body does.
Encountering the works for the first time, one might see a series of minimal structures: wood, metal, string, suspended forms, elements that appear to balance or hang in states of tension. They are roughly human in scale, and when installed together they resemble a group of figures occupying a room. But these are not figures, and they are not abstract sculptures in the formal sense either. They are physical manifestations of linguistic and psychological conditions — confusion, indecision, repetition, rejection, conclusion, misunderstanding — each translated into a structural situation.
Ruheel’s background in calligraphy is evident, but what he does with calligraphy resists the tradition entirely. The letters he uses are not written to be read; they are constructed to be experienced. Urdu letterforms are stretched, mirrored, repeated, suspended, or distorted until they begin to behave less like text and more like forces. A letter becomes a direction. A word becomes a weight. A sentence becomes a structure that holds itself up or collapses under pressure. Language, in these works, is not a system of communication but a system of physical behavior.
What is particularly striking is how each sculpture begins with a condition in language rather than a formal sculptural problem. A stretched sound becomes a dragged form. A repeated phrase becomes repeated structure. A final letter becomes an ending. A word that leaves someone waiting becomes a structure that hangs in the middle. A decision between two possibilities becomes a structure pointing in two directions at once. These works are not abstract; they are translations. They translate linguistic experience into physical structure.
Seen together, the works form what the artist describes as “a crowd of thoughts.” Walking through the installation feels less like walking through a sculpture exhibition and more like walking through a field of internal dialogues. Each structure appears to be in the middle of an action — dragging, hanging, balancing, pointing — as if something has just happened or is about to happen. The sculptures are not resolved forms; they are suspended situations.
This sense of suspension is important. Traditional sculpture often presents itself as stable and complete, but Ruheel’s works exist in a state of incompletion. They are about the moment before a decision is made, before a sentence is finished, before a conversation is resolved. They are sculptures of the unresolved.
There is a long history of artists working with language in visual art. Conceptual artists often present language as text to be read. Calligraphy traditionally emphasizes the beauty of writing. Ruheel removes language from the page entirely and places it into space. His work is not about how language looks, but about what language does: how it pulls, divides, suspends, repeats, and concludes.
It is also important to note the role of gravity in these works. Many of the sculptures involve elements that hang, pull, drag, or rest heavily on the floor. Gravity becomes visible, but not only as a physical force. It begins to read as emotional force — the weight of a word, the pull of a memory, the heaviness of a decision. The works suggest that language itself has gravity.
When installed together, the works are not isolated objects but parts of a spatial conversation. One sculpture leans, another hangs, another points, another drags something behind it. Moving among them feels like moving through different states of mind. The space becomes populated not by objects but by conditions.
What Ruheel ultimately achieves in In other wor(l)ds is a subtle but important shift in how we might think about sculpture. Instead of using sculpture to represent bodies or abstract forms, he uses sculpture to represent linguistic and psychological situations. He gives physical presence to things that normally exist only in conversation and memory: the last word, the repeated word, the misunderstood word, the word that was never said, the decision that was never made.
These sculptures do not ask to be read as symbols or metaphors. They ask to be encountered as situations. One stands next to a structure that hangs and understands something about waiting. One sees a structure pulled down by weight and understands something about rejection. One stands between two directional forms and understands something about indecision. The works do not explain these conditions; they place the viewer inside them.
In this sense, Ruheel’s work is not only about language but about how we experience being human through language. We do not only live among objects and buildings; we live among sentences, conversations, pauses, and memories of words. These invisible structures shape our lives as much as physical structures do.
Ruheel makes these invisible structures visible. He builds sentences that stand in space, thoughts that occupy a room — and walking among them, one begins to realise that we are not only surrounded by objects, but by words — words that, even when unattended, continue to stand quietly around us.