Written in beauty

When Muzzumil Ruheel, a visual artist from Pakistan, learnt of the ruins in Hampi, he reached for a pen and began writing a letter of apology to all the stone residents of the town.

As an artist, he applauded the sculptors who toiled at turning boulders into majestic artworks, and condemned the barbaric attacks on art during the many battles between empires for territorial supremacy.

And, it was a stylised apology, because it was written in calligraphy. But Muzzumil is more popular for his calligrams, an intricate scripting in which shapes are structured using words.

So, he used the animal forms that repeatedly feature on the sculptures and images of Hampi, and transcribed them into calligrams “to redo or repair the broken past, and also as a token of apology and respect to the defaced stones.” He drew a bridge to the past and intervened a history that was well-established using an ink pen on paper.

A noteworthy mission

“This artistic tradition was used to felicitate rulers and warriors in Pakistan, to compare their praiseworthy traits like courage, honesty to animals and birds.

The words were then composed in the shape of an animal, which gave an identity to the concerned person. There are many examples of calligrams in the form of lions made for Nad-e-Ali, praises in the name of Hazrat Ali, who was famed as a brave man, ironically,” shared the artist, who was part of Abhisaran, a residency programme initiated by the Jindal Steel Works (JSW) Foundation recently, curated by Amit Jain.

Muzzumil began the calligraphic journey since his schooling because it was part of the syllabus, but developed an interest in it when he won several handwriting competitions. During high school, he visited Ustad Khurshid B Alam Gohar, a well-known master calligrapher, in his studio and learnt the intricate art from his expertise.

He found the art soothing mentally. But later, he made gains from the sales of the Quranic texts he calligraphed. People held, and continue to hold, religious texts in reverence, and there was always a demand for them.

By now, Muzzumil was keen to pursue arts, a resolve that met his father’s resistance, who insisted that he pursue law. “My father was quite secular, but his view said that art had no financial stability in the present world,” said the artist, who graduated with a Bachelors of Visual Arts from a private university in Lahore, with the scholarship he earned for his talent.

He stayed inspired by the discussions he had with veteran journalists, writers, and the prose of great writers like Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chutgai.

Muzzumil’s artistic output now expanded to include other mediums like oils, video, sound and mixed-media installations. Yak Yak Yak “was an installation that consisted of 21 television sets, all tuned to live news channels, with their maximum volumes, simultaneously.

The idea was driven from the overdose of information and the disparity within that, which is constantly televised in the world today. The object was the experience of assimilation of all that information; multitudes of blaring headlines bombarding away the viewer’s perception.

Millions of perspectives on a single event brilliantly balanced on the edge of analysis and manipulation. The authenticity in the documentation of this history was the concept of this exploration.”

Revisiting history

History holds an important role in Muzzumil’s life, and personally, he believes that art is a way of archiving history, to awaken the viewer from what’s there and given, to give them food for thought, and to make them question history themselves.

In accord with this belief was Muzzumil’s ‘experiment’ when he wrote other texts in calligraphy instead of Quranic scriptures. He even used Roman numerals. It was a subtle message that presented a chance for the readers to carefully note what they saw.

A note that insinuated them to revisit history on their own terms without merely accepting the one handed down to them. At this point he stopped selling calligraphic religious texts.

His recent letter, too, was his way of revisiting history. So, when people 500 years from now look at the ruins of Hampi, they would also know that Muzummil Ruheel, an artist, did balm the hurtful past and did re-create history in his own artistic terms.

In another attempt to let people question the treatment and nature of artworks, the artist collected about 60,000 to 70,000 pictures from magazines and other sources and laid them out on the floor, which could be tread upon. That art was photographed and the photo took a safe place on a gallery wall. The same art in varied locations.

The artist is working on a series of short films and his solo show at Rohtas gallery, Lahore. He is ‘constantly involved in two major research projects, which will be the ground work for a documentary in the offing’.