Text-Based Art

Seen from across a room, many of the paintings read as abstract fields of red, amber, deep blue or near-black, often divided like a horizon. Moving closer, the colour resolves into writing: words repeated until they stop being legible. The sculptures run the other way. A single letterform is enlarged, cut loose from its word and given edges and weight. In both, the eye keeps trying to read, and the work is made to hold that attempt open.

Ruheel has described his work as less about what is written than about what is not: unspoken thoughts, swallowed sentences, left-out histories (see his artist statement). He sees two directions in it, one turned outward to media, power and the language of the state, one turned inward to the pauses within a conversation, and treats them as a single question asked from different sides.

His material is gathered from overheard talk, news broadcasts, family photographs, folklore, history books and everyday speech, including film dialogue and instructions such as “please read it carefully”. These are rewritten into scenarios in which the artist is a court scribe, a fly on a camera, the wind listening at a door. Fiction, in his phrase, rooted in some semblance of truth.

Ruheel began learning calligraphy at school, in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, under Ustad Khurshid Alam Gauhar Qalam, before studying journalism and political science and then visual art at Beaconhouse National University. He recalls being taught to give each letter its correct proportion, and noticing that people looked at calligraphy more than they read it. The text-based work grows from that observation.

A calligraphic gesture becomes an abstract mark; a word becomes an image; a sentence becomes a spatial structure.

His early Thuluth-style works of 2008 and 2009, such as Please Read It Carefully, look like sacred script and read as plain English. The writer Zohreen Murtaza, in Encryption, Decryption: The Politics of Language, connects them to a wider question of who controls a script and who is allowed to read it. In later work the script is dissolved further, until, as Ruheel has put it, the script does not define the work; the work defines the script.

Text has been part of modern and contemporary art since the early twentieth century. Tate’s account of artists who use language ranges from the instructions of Lawrence Weiner to the scrawled writing of Cy Twombly. Ruheel works within that history on specific ground: scripts that are also objects of reverence and instruments of authority, and a calligraphic tradition that he treats as a point of departure rather than a style to continue. The result sits close to minimalism in its restraint and to abstract art in its form, while keeping the weight of the words it holds.

Within the Arab and South Asian world, turning script into abstraction has its own lineage: the Hurufiyya artists, the Saqqakhaneh painters of Iran, Sadequain and Zahoor ul Akhlaq. Related pages: Calligraphic Abstraction, Text-Based Sculpture, Augmented Reality.

Murtaza reads the 2023 exhibition Choose Your Words Carefully as a wry comment on censorship and self-censorship, and the abstraction in it as a way of confronting the histories that shape how language is read, not escaping them. Salwat Ali wrote of the 2019 show Misunderstandings as giving abstract form to the gap that misunderstanding opens between people. In an essay quoted by TARQ, Gemma Sharpe called him a maker of “fictional formalisms.” More on the Research & Ideas page.

Recent solo exhibitions include On Emptiness: To Walk Between Candle and Flame at FRIDAY, Los Angeles (2024), and Choose Your Words Carefully at Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2023). The full list is on Research & Ideas.

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