Muzummil Ruheel, Decoding The Narrator’s Art

Muzzumil Ruheel is a Pakistani artist who speaks vividly through his art about his home, culture, politics and identity. Political art is, in its DNA, courageous art, which questions power and the strictly-dictated ideologies of the few over the many. In this dialogue, art takes flight from its aesthetic beauty to a more authentic reality. It captures memories. It becomes a necessary part of our shared present.

In this series, he uses calligraphy as text, form and texture. Dripping, blurring, copulating in rigid or fluid forms to create an almost visual manuscript in the traditions of a collage. It lends an indelible fluidity to his work.

The physical structure seems to scuffle like multiple stories in motion. They share coded messages of his provocations. Reimagined forms of his artistic discourse. There is a pattern between material, text and form that repeats to curate a cosmos of telling and retelling. Both a reaffirmation and the de-affirmation of ideologies. Like a narration of history and its evolving interpretations between artist and the seer.

The Artist Statement

The investigation of documented history is what defines my practice. A premeditated, calculative and exhaustive analysis of how history, through its ages, in all its forms of documentation, has been mis-contextualised. Where facts are made ambiguous so that they are not lies, yet they bear no semblance of the truth either. Where the lies used are also not lies, but retarded saplings of imperialistic ideals or just plain autocratic ego and hate. If all of history were a never-ending painting, every now and then one would see scratches, smudges, retouched spots, big huge blotches, painted over areas, blackened out areas and some just cut off pieces. The stories of events create visuals that are perceived in our mind when we hear of them through another’s narration. The investigation travels into territories of those visuals that are conjured through stories that have either, only been heard or those stories that were born out of visuals. Since now only a lost visual or a wandering tale is available nothing more can be relied on. It is a mapping of time that has tales to tell. One can read words but not make out sentences the same way we read history but can never make sense of its contradictions. I use these contradictions and fragments of truths to find the poetry within. Where actualities merge and decimate into a fiction that could be, and that is the realm which reverberates with my verses.