In Muzzumil Ruheel’s sculpture a letter or a word is given edges, weight and a position in a room. The works take the question of his paintings, what remains of language when it can no longer simply be read, and put it where the viewer can walk around it.
Looking at the work
The materials are plain: wood, MDF, cane, string, metal, paint and found weights. Some pieces stand, some lean, and some are painted forms attached to a wall. Look at the edges and the gaps between parts. They are where the work does its thinking, and what you read changes as you move. His training in Urdu, Persian and Arabic calligraphy shapes his sense of the letterform even when no recognisable letter remains.
Characters
The 2022 Character series is made of painted metal, in sculptures and reliefs. Murtaza reads them through minimalism and abstraction, for their edges, the tension between forms and their solidity, and argues that their apparent self-containment hides histories of conflict and erasure. She notes the irony of titles such as Long Story and Let’s Talk About It on forms that appear complete in themselves. Writing in Dawn about Something Is Missing, from the same exhibition, Peerzada Salman observes that the missing element lies with the viewer, not the work.
Conversation made physical
For his first solo exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai, Baaton se baat nikalti hai (2018–19), Ruheel made paintings and sculptural installations around conversation, from intimate exchange to confrontation, and what is said and left unsaid in it. Letters are twisted, mirrored, repeated and isolated. The gallery noted that the text can be read yet no single coherent meaning emerges. Gemma Sharpe’s phrase “fictional formalisms” fits the way a narrative is carried into the discipline of calligraphy. In Misunderstandings (2019) wall and floor pieces gave the gap between people a physical form.
History as a structure
Son of Punjab, made for the Lahore Biennale, is a monument to Rai Abdullah Bhatti, known as Dulla. It holds competing historical accounts of him in one structure, an object in which versions of a story are present at once.
Recent work
He Listens, I Ramble (2025) was made in dialogue with Zahoor ul Akhlaq and shown in Dialogues Across Time, curated by Saira Danish Ahmed at Chawkandi Art Gallery, Karachi. A Quiet Wildness (2026), a work in painted mild steel, shares its title with his solo exhibition at Daniel und die Kunst, Hamburg.
Selected works
Without material
In Meeting Point (India Art Fair, 2022) the sculptures exist only through a phone or tablet camera. See Augmented Reality. The same ideas run through his Text-Based Art and Calligraphic Abstraction.
Enquiries
For enquiries about works, exhibitions and press, write to muzzumilstudio@gmail.com. Contact page