Seher Shah at NATURE MORTE Dhan Mill
Three days after Seher Shah’s present opened in New Delhi, Muslim-owned retailers and a mosque in a northern neighborhood of the town had been illegally bulldozed by the Hindu-nationalist-BJP-led municipal company. This act of politically motivated city destruction lends an intense cost to an exhibition oriented round architectural types and archaeological heritage.
Play with damaging house and dystopian themes have lengthy been a part of Shah’s observe. “Notes from a Metropolis Unknown,” 2021, is a collection of thirty-two display prints of monochromatic diagrams accompanied by lyrical annotations seemingly describing the various incarnations of Delhi, from the “Metropolis of Quiet Souls” to “Metropolis of Bootlickers and Murders.” Paying homage to Zarina’s woodcuts, the geometric compositions recommend a dialectic of sunshine and shadow, with the town revealed within the gaps. On the alternative wall, the collection “Ruined Rating,” 2022, options the marks and clefs of musical notation. Dislodged from their bars and swept into dense cobwebs or stray squiggles, these notes make for an unplayable composition.
Single Utopias (Corridor of Nations III—New Delhi), 2018, is a big graphite rendering of one among India’s best examples of modernist structure. Its demolition in 2017 was interpreted as one other try by the BJP authorities to erase the nation’s secular-humanist heritage. Argument from Silence, 2019, affords a portfolio of ten photogravure prints of Gandhara sculptures on the Chandigarh Museum, which was arrange in 1947 simply after partition. The objects are framed in ways in which deflate their grandeur and overlaid with oil marks that, like graffiti, draw consideration to their interstices. By emphasizing the artifacts’ relationship to their show website, Shah reminds us that they characterize not simply the subcontinent’s civilization, however its divisions.
— Kamayani Sharma
