In Muzzumil Ruheel’s augmented reality works, sculpture becomes something you cannot see until you look for it. The works exist only through the camera of a phone or tablet, appearing inside the viewer’s own surroundings — in a gallery, a room or a street — and changing as the viewer moves.
Meeting Point
Meeting Point, presented at India Art Fair in 2022, imagines a world of “ghost words”: fragments of speech that gather unheard in the spaces around us. Through the screen, these words take form as sculptures that hover, twist and settle in the room, visible only to the person holding the device.
In Ha Ha Ha, the Urdu syllable “Ha” is repeated until it coils into a spring-like form. Point, No, Ummm and Wow take small, everyday sounds — the hesitations and reactions that fill a conversation — and give them bodies in space. These are not words that carry big statements; they are the overlooked parts of language, made suddenly present.
Why augmented reality
Ruheel’s practice has always moved language off the page: from calligraphy into abstraction, from abstraction into sculpture. Augmented reality takes this one step further. The sculpture no longer needs a fixed place or a physical material. It appears in the viewer’s own field of vision, so the viewer’s movement becomes part of the work, and the line between the visible and the invisible becomes the subject itself.
The question remains the same as in his paintings and sculptures: how can something that exists only as an idea — a word unspoken, a sound unheard — be given form without being reduced to an illustration?
Related
Read more about text-based sculpture and text-based art in Ruheel’s practice.