Seher Shah, Of Absence and Weight: The Definitive Biography

Of Absence and Weight is the first comprehensive monograph of Pakistani-born, New York-based artist Seher Shah, a leading figure in South Asian art working at the edge of architectural drawing and abstraction.

The book surveys twenty years of Shah’s practice across drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. 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 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; and the Art Jameel Collection, in Dubai.

Murtaza Vali is a writer and curator based between Brooklyn and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Sean Anderson is associate professor and director of the undergraduate program in architecture at Cornell University. Jyoti Dhar is an art critic and editor based in Dubai. Catherine David is an art historian, curator, and former director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at Centre Pompidou in Paris.