While Recitation, Hisham’s previous show in the country, remained a meditative rhythm of repetition and incantation, with pastel-on-paper paintings affirming our systems of knowledge, belief, spirituality, and memory, Shrines—his third solo exhibition with Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke—spirals into the ineffable, the unknown. Admitted into a sanctum sanctorum of visual forms, palettes, and mediums not previously engaged with, one truth reveals itself to us with striking clarity: nothing here carries the comfort of the familiar. This is Abul Hisham remade, an artist who has shed the skin of his earlier practice. And ‘Man near the Wall’ (2025), with its brooding composition, arcane hieroglyphs, and rot-infested panels brings this into sharp relief.
In his new body of work, Hisham does not abandon tradition outright. Instead, he works from within its frame, pressing gently yet insistently against its limits, loosening its fixities so that what seemed familiar begins to appear estranged, uncanny, strangely alive. His figures—partly effaced, partly remade—become mirrors that return to us not the comfort of recognition but the unease of distortion, the sense that beneath the surfaces of the ordinary lies a second depth, a hidden resonance. What he accomplishes is not destruction but revelation: an elevation, consummation, transubstantiation into a plane of existence. Absence itself becomes radiant and the sacred persists not as dogma but as an atmosphere, a fragile aura.
In the end, Shrines is less an exhibition than an act of consecration. What Abul Hisham gathers here are not simply phantasmagorical paintings and totemic pillars but vestiges of architectural shards, fugitive memories, and ritual gestures that together summon the atmosphere of a sanctuary at once broken and remade. These works breathe with the scent of incense and the dim glow of remembered rooms; they recall the tactile intimacy of childhood visits to sacred sites, yet transpose that devotion into a language of rupture and reinvention. To walk through Shrines is to enter a liturgy of fragments, where walls, arches, and bodies appear only in part, as if retrieved from a ruin that still radiates its spirit. In this imagined architecture, both personal and collective, memory is neither whole nor lost—it survives in pieces, luminous in its incompleteness. What Hisham offers is a shrine without centre, a sanctuary built from absence, where ruin itself becomes devotional: a space in which the sacred is glimpsed not in permanence, but in the fragile persistence of what remains.
Shankar Tripathi