SOUTH SOUTH (SS): How would you describe the evolution of your artistic practice, particularly this movement toward interiority that has strongly influenced the most recent years of your work?

Seher Shah (SSH): I am interested in how spaces speak to us through the visible and unseen. And how drawing can reveal the hidden within ourselves. I find myself moving closer to drawing’s ability to speak to things that cannot easily be expressed in words.

SS: How do you think about the audience for your work? Does this influence your thematic references or the ways in which you present your work?

SSH: Each audience brings their own histories, translations and languages. If a person finds something in the work they hold close, it is a very special exchange. I keep going back to intimacy as a state where I find resonance. An exchange, determined by time and understanding, through a generosity in sharing private thoughts. I find myself drawn to understanding this state through works on paper. At the same time, the privacy within my work space is a place I hold dear. Once a work leaves this space it lives through the eyes of another.

I keep going back to intimacy as a state where I find resonance. An exchange, determined by time and understanding, through a generosity in sharing private thoughts.

SOUTH SOUTH (SS): Drawing, printmaking and sculpture all create different forms of intimacy between the artist and the work that unfolds and require particular visceral embodiment. How do you think about these intimacies in your practice as an artist who works across these mediums?

SSH: Each process speaks to a different tactility and fragility. Drawing through marks and constructed spaces, etchings through control and intuition, photogravures and cyanotypes through light, and woodcuts through the removal of material. Each process engages our visual sensibilities through their surfaces, material weight and the infinite possibilities between depth and flatness.

I have also drawn my way into sculpture. There is a certain power that elemental materials hold, such as cast iron. A certain quality that speaks to time and the vastness of landscape. Sculpture is a way to experiment with how line moves into three-dimensional form and to explore weathered and marked surfaces.

SS: Considering how urban living, architecture, politics and history intertwine has been part of your thematic focus as well as exploring poetry and abstraction, creating a kind of visual poetry and historical analysis of your own. Could you share more about these interests and why you feel so connected to exploring them?

SSH: Cities speak to us in infinite ways. They bind the architectural, political and historical to the intimate and personal through different proximities and temperatures. A city can also amplify the past in our daily lives. Fragments from the past are continually within our present orbits, whether visible or unseen. Timeless, turbulent and at times, violent.

SS: Your current show is titled Notes from a City Unknown. What was the thinking behind the title, and how would you describe the relationships that are formed between the multiple bodies of work through bringing them together in this show?

SSH: In many ways the exhibition, Notes from a City Unknown, is a record of my time in a city. It binds places both real and imagined. Observed moments and memory through works on paper and sculpture. The landscape of the city reveals itself at different moments through markers of time. I have shared those works that speak to these reflections during my time here.

The fractured histories within a museum’s Gandhara sculpture collection are positioned alongside a series of night landscapes through the absence of light. A series of variations on the incomplete line fall between architectural abstraction and music notations, but communicate neither language in their entirety. The erased site of the Hall of Nations sits as a phantom above a large cast concrete sculptural installation. Binding these relationships are a series of notes on a city, gathered over seven years, alongside architectural abstractions. Collected moments through relationships between form and language, and a sharing of private thoughts.