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.

Shah’s recent work is more intimate, focusing on the overlooked gaps and ruptures in domestic space and the familiar rhythms of daily life, while working with literature and poetry—by Jorge Luis Borges, Agha Shahid Ali, and others—for both inspiration and solace. This turn inwards coincided with her time living in New Delhi, during a period of growing authoritarianism and surveillance. It was both an act of self-preservation and of resistance. A portfolio of screen prints on paper, Shah’s Notes from a City Unknown (2021) 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 wich current injustices both echo and exceed the traumas of the past.

Though the line in Shah’s drawing series Of Dust and Measure (5–9) (2019–21) references both architectural drawing and musical notation, it structures neither space nor time. Often interrupted or deflected, it is instead a tool for formal play, serving as figure within grounds of misty gray built up gradually and carefully using fine graphite dust. Meditations on how we mark time, these drawings are poised between accumulation and inscription, memory, and history—between what remains unquantifiable about life and our stubborn need to still measure it.