Seher Shah brings his beautiful architectonic abstraction to Glasgow Print Studio for ‘The Weight of Air and Memory’, an exhibition documenting his nine-year relationship with the studio’s master printers. The Karachi-born artist’s practice is influenced by legacies of modernist architecture across the Indian subcontinent, as well as tales of colonial exploitation and Shah’s personal experiences of displacement. His interest in geopolitical borders and disputed territories (such as those created by the partition of India in 1947) reflects his interest in the affinities between different graphic media.
The exhibition consists of seven discrete sequences, moving from photoengraving and engraving to sketching in graphite dust and ink. In the “Ruined Score” series, 2020, overlapping multidirectional staves in part suggest musical notation as a kind of memory palace. At the same time, parallel lines can also be read as train tracks or the outlines of city plans. “Studies from a Sculpture Garden,” 2020, incorporates motifs from brutalist architecture into impossible post-cubist building designs. The forms oscillate between figure and ground, three- and two-dimensionality.
The emotional and thematic core of the exhibition is “Arguments from Silence”, 2019, a set of photogravures built around images of sculptural fragments created by the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization of Gandhara. The layering of grid-like patterns on these artifacts—part of a historical collection now divided between India and Pakistan—suggests a possible mode of engagement with Shah’s work. Its layered abstract forms perhaps supersede the many, often contradictory, ways of recording and measuring history and identity in a region of the world where these things are sources of pervasive political tension.
