exhibitions & events 2023

Seher Shah: The Weight of Air and Memory

Glasgow Print Studio presents The Weight of Air and Memory, the first major solo exhibition in the UK by internationally renowned artist Seher Shah.

The artist, who has works in the permanent collections of London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris has been working with GPS since 2014 when she was invited to the city as part of the international exchange programme ‘Below Another Sky’ which was supported by Creative Scotland and included in the Glasgow 2014 programme.

The exhibition brings together works on paper published in collaboration with GPS since 2014 and reflects the deep trust of a nine-year relationship between the artist and Glasgow Print Studio’s Master Printmakers. It binds places both real and imagined, with marks that retain the traces of time, through architecture, objects, and the language of mark-making. The exhibition will include two brand new and exclusive editions which have never been seen before.

"The Weight of Air and Memory are my studies into absence through relationships between printmaking and drawing. States of absence are explored on paper through fragility and material weight. The fractured histories within a Gandharan sculpture collection in a Chandigarh museum in India are positioned alongside a series of graphite dust drawings. A series of variations on the incomplete line fall between architectural abstraction and music notation, but communicate neither language in their entirety. Connecting all the works from a decade are the ways in which cities speak back to us; through the historical and in between the political and personal." - Seher Shah

The Weight of Air and Memory is a comprehensive survey of work that is a love letter to mark-making, meditation and memory using printmaking as materiality as a means of investigation.

Seher Shah (b. 1975, Karachi, lives and works in Barcelona) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Shah works across drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, exploring ideas in architecture and perspective drawing traditions. For over two decades, the intimacy of the hand through mark-making has been a source of curiosity, research, and experimentation in her practice. Her work speaks to the poetics and fractures of how we view the landscape around us, through the historical and the intimate.

She has collaborated with architectural photographer, Randhir Singh, on a series of cyanotype studies in form and since 2014, with the Glasgow Print Studio, through the printmaking processes of intaglio, photogravure and woodcut in several published works. Her works can be found in the collections of museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queens Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai; and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

Works from the exhibition can be viewed online here.                          

Image: Seher Shah, ‘Argument from Silence (fragments and bodies)’, 2019, polymer photogravure, 76 x 63.5 cm, portfolio of 10. 'The Weight of Air and Memory' exhibition installation at Glasgow Print Studio, photography courtesy Randhir Singh. Seher Shah at Glasgow Print Studio, photography courtesy Fiona Watson.