Emptiness is not Nothingness.

Emptiness is not nothingness. It is the space of potential, the home of possibility, the pause between claps, the flicker between candle and fire.

But it’s also a space that terrifies us. The blank page, the silence pregnant with meaning, the fallow soil waiting to give birth to the harvest. And so we rush with a desperate frenzy to fill the NoThing with the SomeThing. Anything.

What if we said to Emptiness - Come stay a while, friend? If we delighted in the shadow, not just the object? If we fell in love with the space between? If we snuggled up to the memory baked in, still humming inside the abandoned home, the empty room, the ember after the fire?

Nothing is ever truly empty. It’s only waiting, and remembering.

Muzummil Ruheel’s latest work jumps into the black hole of emptiness with curiosity and quiet respect. After filling the canvas with row upon row of meditative calligraphy, baking in meaning and memory with every stroke, Muzummil held a bowl of water and poured it down each canvas, blurring the words into a distorted river of language and memory.

A liquid conversation between form and formlessness, creation and destruction, presence and impermanence. Only the memory remains.

To contrast the organic void, Muzummil juxtaposes each piece with the calculated precision of crisp lines - a geometry of order crosscutting the abyss. Candle, meet flame. From emptiness, everything emerges.

“On Emptiness: To Walk Between Candle and Fire” is a meditation on the fleeting beauty of change, the humble patience of potential, and the power of what remains.

To wandering emptiness together,
FRIDAY