Green Art Gallery invites everyone to explore Of Dust and Woven Air, a solo exhibition by Pakistani multidisciplinary artist Seher Shah. Running through 5 April 2025, the show displays Shah’s latest works inspired by The Dacca Gauzes, a poem by Indian-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, alongside several art pieces from her earlier practice.
Ali’s poem reflects on his grandmother’s admiration for Dacca gauzes, a fine muslin fabric produced in Dhaka during the 17th and 18th centuries. Once a symbol of honour and prestige, this fabric became a metaphor for the loss of craftsmanship, cultural heritage, and personal memory. Through his grandmother’s recollections and the broader historical context of British colonial rule in Bengal, Ali crafts an elegy on the impermanence of beauty and tradition.
For Shah, the poem made her think about how materials carry history — woven with narratives that bridge time and place. Ali’s words stirred memories of her maternal family and the cities they lived in, creating a map between the real and the imagined. Tracing connections from Chittagong to Chennai and Kochi, and across the Arabian Sea to Karachi, the artist examines how personal and collective memories intertwine across geographies.
The exhibition explores themes of absence and remembrance, expressed through line, form, and materiality. Shah engages with dust as a medium and metaphor, working with Bengal muslin, the very fabric at the heart of Ali’s poem, to weave a visual dialogue on erasure, history, and the fragility of memory.
About the artist
Seher Shah (b. 1975, Karachi, Pakistan) resides in Barcelona (Spain). She obtained a BFA and BArch from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI, USA) in 1998.
Shah’s practice merges her background in art and architecture, exploring space, landscape, and materiality through drawing, printmaking, writing, and sculpture. Her art navigates the intersections of the historical and the intimate, the architectural and the political, often engaging with themes of absence, fragility, and fragmentation. Using graphite, ink, charcoal, dust, cast concrete, and iron, she examines the weight of mark-making and the presence of material on surfaces.
Shah’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Drawing Biennial 2024 (Drawing Room, London, UK); The Weight of Air and Memory (solo) (Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow, Scotland, 2023); Seher Shah and Randhir Singh: Studies in Form (SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, USA, 2022); the 16th Lyon Biennale (France, 2022); and Planetary Planning (Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2018), among others.
In 2009, Shah became a finalist for the Jameel Prize 2009 (V&A, London, and Art Jameel, Dubai). Her artworks are part of prestigious public collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Tate Modern (London), and Hamburger Kunsthalle (Germany).
To get more information about Of Dust and Woven Air, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in visiting Narrators of Dissonance, a collective exhibition at 1X1 Art Gallery.
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