A review of Point of No Return, Muzzumil Ruheel, Rohtas 2, Lahore, 2018
Zara Amjad
There is a particular kind of silence that arrives not from absence but from excess. Too many words, too much noise, too much that has already been said in exactly the way it has always been said. Muzzumil Ruheel’s Point of No Return at Rohtas 2, Lahore begins precisely there — at the exhaustion of language, at the moment the poet puts down his pen not because he has nothing to say but because he cannot bring himself to say it the way everyone expects.
Ruheel occupies a distinctive position within South Asian contemporary art. Where artists in the calligraphic tradition have largely worked within its decorative and devotional registers — the beautiful letter, the sacred phrase, the elegant composition — Ruheel has spent more than a decade dismantling those conventions from the inside. Trained in classical Nastaliq under master calligrapher Ustad Khurshid Alam Gohar, he holds the tradition with genuine intimacy, which makes his interrogation of it all the more precise. He knows exactly what he is questioning.
In this, he is closer in spirit to Barbara Kruger than to any calligraphic predecessor. Like Kruger, Ruheel understands that language is never neutral — that words carry the weight of who is permitted to use them, who is expected to be silent, and who decides. Where Kruger uses the blunt instrument of advertising language to expose power, Ruheel works from within the poetic tradition, pulling at the threads of convention until the whole fabric comes loose. The question is not what the poem says. The question is who told you it had to rhyme.
The exhibition opens with Drivel — a large sheet of wasli paper covered edge to edge in dense Urdu script. The writing is inverted, upside down, and at close range dissolves entirely into texture. It is the work of a hand that could not stop, a mind that kept producing language long after language had stopped producing meaning. The surface has the quality of skin, or static, or the inside of a mind that has been running too long. To read it you would have to turn the work — or turn yourself. Which is, of course, what the artist is asking.
Across the gallery, Endless Rambling stretches nearly eight feet along the wall. A sentence in Nastaliq, written in the tradition of Khat-e-Musalsal — the continuous script of Islamic calligraphy, designed for phrases that must not be interrupted — carries a line that is neither sacred nor profound. It is the kind of thing that gets stuck in your head: slightly absurd, accidentally rhyming, impossible to dislodge. The tradition of unbroken script, historically reserved for devotional text, here holds something closer to an earworm. The gap between the gravitas of the form and the lightness of the content is where the work lives.
Looking for Weight in the Words is perhaps the most physically direct work in the exhibition. Urdu letterforms cut from wood hang from a bazaar weighing scale by red thread, their mass registered on the dial. The question — how much does a word weigh? — is one that Etel Adnan might have asked, though she would have arrived at it through the lyric rather than the object. Adnan spent decades navigating the politics of which language to write in, the weight of Arabic against French against English, the cost of each choice. Ruheel arrives at the same territory from a different direction: not the politics of choosing a language, but the self-censorship embedded within one. The boundaries around what can be said, the inherited caution, the habit of measuring before speaking — all of it made literal, hung on a hook, weighed in grams.
The floor-based works carry a different register. Ostentatious Presence places the Urdu word Mein — I — directly on the gallery floor, upside down, three-dimensional, chunky and heavy as a stone. The ego, grounded. The self, made available to anyone who walks past rather than elevated for those with the appropriate sensibility. It recalls Ed Ruscha’s treatment of words as objects, his insistence that language could be extracted from its communicative function and made to exist purely as thing — though where Ruscha tends toward the cool and the deadpan, Ruheel’s Mein has something almost vulnerable about it, lying there on the tiles, waiting to be noticed or stepped around.
Push performs a similar operation with the word Zor — force, effort, exertion — stretching its letters until they become abstract forms on the floor, readable only from a specific angle. To find the word you have to stop, reorient, look differently. The work enacts what it describes: the moment before the push, the pause that precedes effort, the question of whether the push was necessary in the first place.
Mindless Rhythms is the exhibition’s most formally elegant work. Four instances of the Urdu letter Rey — ر, the sound that ends a thousand poems, the rhyme that makes a line feel complete — emerge separately from the wall and cascade toward the floor. The rest of the poem, the content, the thought, the struggle, has been left on the other side. What comes through is only the ending. Only the part that was always expected. The work is a precise critique of poetic convention dressed as sculpture, and it is quietly devastating.
The exhibition closes, fittingly, with Shushed — a tall vertical rod on the wall, holding the incomplete Urdu word Chup. Be quiet. Stop. The word does not finish itself. It exists in the space between the command and its completion, between the silencing and the silence. It is the work that makes explicit what the rest of the exhibition has been circling: the question of who gets to speak, who is told to stop, and what remains when the words run out.
Ruheel has described this body of work as emerging from a state of being stuck — the condition of a poet who cannot write what has not already been written, who cannot use language the way it has always been used, who finds himself standing at the point of no return. What is remarkable about Point of No Return is that this condition, so personal and so specific to the creative process, opens outward into something much larger. The conventions of poetry become the conventions of speech. The poet’s self-censorship becomes the society’s. The stuck writer becomes anyone who has ever measured their words before letting them out.
This is what separates Ruheel from artists who merely use calligraphy as aesthetic material. He understands that script carries history, that every letterform arrives with the weight of what it has been used for and what it has been used to silence. To work in this tradition and against it simultaneously — to know it well enough to question it — requires a particular kind of patience and a particular kind of courage. Point of No Return has both.