Of Absence and Weight is the first comprehensive monograph of Pakistani-born artist Seher Shah, a leading figure in South Asian art working at the edge of architectural drawing and abstraction.
Surveying twenty years of Shah’s practice across drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, the book includes in-depth essays by leading historians and curators alongside the artist’s own writings and poetry. Her work speaks to the poetics and fractures of the surrounding landscape, spanning the historical and the intimate. She has explored ideas in architecture and perspective drawing traditions; contested relationships between history, objects, and time; and examined the relationship between poetry and abstraction.
Her works are found in several institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Centre Pompidou, in Paris; the Tate Modern, in London; Ishara Art Foundation and the Art Jameel Collection, in Dubai.
Published by Rizzoli, the book includes a foreward by Catherine David, art historian, curator, and former director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at Centre Pompidou in Paris alongside essays by Murtaza Vali, writer and curator based between Brooklyn and Sharjah, UAE; Jyoti Dhar, art critic and editor based in Dubai, UAE; and Sean Anderson, associate professor and director of the undergraduate program in architecture at Cornell University.