Peaceful Grammar of Risham Syed

It was a great pleasure to read Raza Rumi’s Article on Risham Syed’s work and start looking into her work with a fresh, ritualistic perspective. There is a quiet violence in how Risham Syed stitches the time. Not with the grand gestures of monument builders, but with the patient, almost devotional, precision of someone repairing a torn sleeve. Her needle does not pass through fabric with simplicity; it pierces the thin membrane between memory and oblivion. Each thread is a sentence in a language we’ve forgotten how to read, pulling us backward into rooms we never entered but somehow recognise: a child’s dress preserved under glass, its embroidery echoing a grandmother’s unfinished song; a chair wrapped in muslin like a relic from a home that no longer exists, or perhaps never did.

Syed’s work understands what museums do not, that history is not stored in dates or declarations, but more than that it lies in the warp and weft of everyday objects. A handkerchief (The Seven Seas and the Seven Stars, 2010) becomes an atlas of loss, its stains mapping migrations forced and chosen. The cloth is fragile, yellowing at the edges, as if the past itself is decomposable and biodegradable. And yet, there is defiance in this fragility. To display such ephemera is to whisper, as in illuminations, Walter Benjamin says, “In the ruins of great buildings, the idea of the plan speaks more eloquently than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are.”Her maps are rebellions in miniature. “A Needlewoman’s Map of My Country” (2013) does not pretend to objectivity; it confesses its incompleteness. Pinholes mark not cities but absences; threads stretch like roads leading nowhere.

This is cartography as lived experience, where borders bleed and memory distorts scale. The work asks: Can a nation be sewn back together after the scissors of Partition? The answer, perhaps, lies in the gaps between stitches. Even her three-dimensional pieces, a child’s chair swaddled like an infant, “This is Not a Chair”(2016), a stack of books wrapped in cloth as if protecting them from rain, speak in the subjunctive mood. They are not representations of things, but possibilities of things. The chair is not a chair but the ghost of a child who might have sat there; the books are not books but the shadows of stories that were never written down. Syed deals in the archaeology of the unrecorded, digging not through soil but through silence. When her work enters galleries, an alchemy occurs.

The white walls, grey walls, red walls, all the walls usually so arrogant in their neutrality, grow humble with the work. They become mere vessels for her fragile testaments. In “The Museum of Found Objects” (2019), vitrives display combs, spoons, buttons, and the detritus of domestic life elevated to the status of artifacts. The gesture is at once ironic and earnest. She seems to say to me through her work that the ‘Louvre’ is the overlooked. Time in Syed’s sphere is not linear but cyclical. Her later pieces, unsent letters stitched with half-remembered verses “Letters to the Postman” (2022) suggest that the past is not behind us but coiled within, in a long wait to be reopened. The envelopes are sealed yet transparent, just like memories, vivid and elusive. They dialogue: ‘Who is the postman for these epistles? The future? The past? The God? Or only ourselves, returning like ghosts to the moments we failed to understand when they were still called a present?’

To walk through an exhibition of Syed’s work is to move through a house where every object hums with unspoken narrative. The air smells faintly of turmeric and mothballs, the scent of preservation and its slow undoing. You leave not with answers but with a new literacy. You begin to read the world as she does: a textile fraying at the edges, its patterns only visible when held up to the light at just the right angle. The works mentioned in this essay were beautifully intriguing, resonate with me and will live with me forever. This, the ideation, the material, the objects, the narrative in her work, is the genius of her art. It does not shout its truths. It waits, like a needle poised above cloth, for you to come close enough to hear the whisper of the thread passing through. And when you do, you realise: the mending is not just of the object, but of you.