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Notes from a City Unknown
Seher Shah
Seher Shah’s Notes from a City Unknown (on display in Exhibition Hall B6) reflects on her time in the city. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), it consists of twenty-seven short poetic texts written between 2014 and 2021 that weave personal impressions and observations with reflections on architecture, history, and contemporary politics. Each spare but allusive text is paired with a heavy architectonic abstraction, a juxtaposition continuing Shah’s ongoing explorations of weight—of a mark, of a shape, of language, of history. In this prismatic portrait, New Delhi remains unnamed and, ultimately, incomprehensible, a contentious and complex palimpsest in which current injustices both echo and exceed the traumas of the past.
I began writing notes on New Delhi in the winter of 2013. A place where you learn to hold opposites in the palm of your hand and grasp for a semblance of understanding. Collected from a decade in the capital city, these notes and confessions came from a need to share words through the intimacy of paper. A record of time through the constellations that left their residue and imprints, or those whose voices I hold dear.
In the beginning, I do not know what drove me to write. A need to remember, or to record, and understand the accumulations observed as an outsider. Over time, writing gave me a space to listen. Cities speak back to us in infinite ways. And in the end, we are always searching for home.
Seher Shah
New Delhi, December 2022
Short film by Seher Shah
Produced by Whistleman Films
Seher Shah
Seher Shah adapts the tools and conventions of architecture (graphite, ink, paper, perspective, plan, and elevation) into an artistic language uniquely her own. Having studied both fine arts and architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States, her long-term collaborations with architectural photographer Randhir Singh and the Glasgow Print Studio in the United Kingdom represent meeting points for her varied interests across architecture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. She has engaged monumental formats in her past work, which have ranged from large-scale graphite drawings to series in various media that deconstructed the aesthetics and ideologies of Brutalist architecture.