Muzzumil Ruheel

Muzzumil Ruheel

Research & Ideas

Notes on the ideas, sources and methods behind Muzzumil Ruheel’s work, and a guide to what has been written about it. Each exhibition, in his own account, is a chapter in a continuing inquiry and not a conclusion.

The unsaid

The constant subject is what does not get said: the omitted, the censored, the swallowed sentence, the pause in a conversation. Ruheel describes two directions in his work, one turned outward to media, power and the language of the state and one turned inward to the pauses in speech, and treats them as one question asked from different sides. See his artist statement.

Fact and fiction

His stories, he says, are rooted in some semblance of truth, and then change as they pass from teller to teller. The press release for Lost in His Own Garden (Grosvenor Gallery, 2016) describes the narrator as the one who decides what to exaggerate, leave out or stress, and the artist as an invisible witness moving among people, objects and places and overhearing them.

Script and authority

Because his scripts are Urdu, Persian and Arabic, the work meets questions of reverence, religion and control. Murtaza places it in the history of who has governed writing, from the court calligraphers to colonial press laws, and asks whether a script can be taken apart without taking its politics with it. Newsline saw in the 2014 work a challenge to the reflex of treating any Arabic text as sacred.

A universal script

In the exhibition behind Choose Your Words Carefully (2023), the gallery statement described a new global language taking shape in a collective subconscious, one that would need a universal script. Dawn found the idea idealistic and the paint-on-metal works what grounded it.

Method

Ruheel gathers material from overheard conversations, news broadcasts, family photographs, folklore, history books and everyday talk, including film dialogue and instructions such as “please read it carefully”. He lets each idea choose its medium, which is why the practice moves between painting, sculpture, installation, sound, video, public projects and augmented reality. He has taught at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Beaconhouse National University and the University of Karachi.

Questions

What is text-based art?

Art in which writing is the subject, material or structure of the work and not a caption. Tate’s account of conceptual art describes text as able to be the work itself. See Text-Based Art.

Is it calligraphy?

It begins there. Ruheel was trained in calligraphy as a schoolboy and the work moves beyond it as ornament or devotion. See Calligraphic Abstraction.

Why can’t I read the writing?

Often it is not meant to be read in full. Letters fragment, repeat and thin out so that the viewer notices the act of reading itself and the wish to find meaning in a mark.

How do I see the augmented reality works?

Through the camera of a phone or tablet, in the room where you are standing. See Augmented Reality.

How do I ask about a work or an exhibition?

Write to muzzumilstudio@gmail.com.

Exhibitions

Ruheel has had more than twenty solo exhibitions since 2011 and has taken part in biennales, fairs and group exhibitions in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Lebanon, Nepal and Russia. Biennale presentations include the Lahore Biennale, Karachi Biennale, Colombo Art Biennale, Cairo Documenta and the Young Moscow International Biennale. Selected solo exhibitions:

Selected group exhibitions include The Written Image (South Asia Institute, Chicago, 2025), Animalia (Kunsthalle Darmstadt, 2023) and shows at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi (2015), and the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini, Milan (2018). He is included in Salima Hashmi’s The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art (2015). Full biography and CV.

Writing on the work

Enquiries

For enquiries about works, exhibitions and press, write to muzzumilstudio@gmail.com. Contact page