He Wrote of Their Glory.
We have been brought up to believe in the sanctity of the written word — promises are binding when they appear in textual form, histories are deemed legitimate when they are recorded in writing and memories are sanctified as facts when published as autobiography. It is hard to challenge the primacy of the written word, no matter where it appears; this is why, even as we watch movies in languages we know, our eyes are constantly reading the subtitles. This is also why so many of us, as we move around the world, feel an almost compulsive urge to read out hoardings and signs in our mind or why, when confronted with a book in a script we can’t read, the feeling is almost one of betrayal.
At an exhibition titled “In Letter and Spirit”, which is being held at Mumbai’s Tarq, three artists seek to challenge this hold that the written word has and look at text as purely a visual form. Saubiya Chasmawala, Youdhisthir Maharjan and Muzzumil Ruheel, each find their own way of taking apart and effacing text in order to find meanings which are independent of the literal meanings of the words. As gallerist Hena Kapadia says, “Rather than using text as ancillary, each of these artists engage deeply with the text in their work, whether with its narrative nature, symbolism, or materiality.”
New Hampshire-based Maharjan, for example, seeks to explore what he describes as the “thingness of text”. He says, “They are independent of meanings pre-assigned to them and independent from the burden to relay my message. They can truly and freely be themselves. It is all about the text. In other words, my works are self portraits of the text.” He does this by “reclaiming” pages from used books and layering his interventions on them; in Beneath Her Feet, for instance, he has painted over all the text on a page, leaving only the alphabet O visible, everywhere that it appears. He has then, in a delightfully playful touch, doodled clouds around each O, thus creating a work that is whimsical, but also pointing out that letters, by themselves, are little more than random figures. Ruheel’s work uses text to reclaim different things; these could be the details that get lost as a story makes its way from the narrator’s mouth to the output of the scribe. Or it could be, as cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote says in the catalogue essay, that they reclaim “script from scripture” and decrees of jurists, the exhortations of pamphlets. Perhaps, Hoskote suggests, calligraphy can also be reclaimed from its description as “decorative art” and transformed into the basis of a new graphic idiom. The intricately-layered forms constructed by Ruheel, using Urdu calligraphy, reveal the sheer beauty of the textual form, free from any meaning assigned to it. In fact the Karachi-based artist has used the written word in the past in an attempt to free it from any pre-assigned meanings or labels. For instance, a previous work, Please Read It Carefully, played with the perception that Arabic calligraphy looks sacred, but the actual words could have utterly mundane meanings. He recalls, “The pieces would read texts like ‘think before you see,’ ‘what is written’, ‘look at me’ and ‘touch me’, but these were written in a font that looked scared, and that achieved the purpose when the audience would look and talk about the works with religious reverence. It was amusing for me to witness how the audience remained in their oblivion and praised the visuals for its ‘religious significance’.”
The works by Chasmawala are perhaps the most personal and her approach is the most visceral. According to her the words that appear in the Arabic script are nonsensical, because the artist only ever learned to write the words, and never to understand their meaning. This was a conscious decision, she reveals. “When I was a child I was taught to recite verses and I would do that, without really understanding the meaning. But because these words had a certain energy, that was enough for me. Then, in college, I did a course on reading and writing Arabic, but I stopped short of understanding the meaning, because it wasn’t essential for me. The visual form of the text was enough.” For the Vadodara-based artist, the actual, “surface” meaning doesn’t matter because what she wants to get at is something deeper inside. In her works, this is represented by incisions and scratches made on the surface. “To go inside, I have to make a wound on the surface. Then, when I don’t find anything inside, I come out and make a suture and that becomes an expression of my story,” she says.
