Of Dust and Woven Air: Seher Shah

Of Dust and Woven Air is an exhibition by Seher Shah that meditates on absence, memory, and material resonance through drawing, printmaking, and poetry. The title itself reflects two intertwined concepts: dust and woven air.

Shah’s work explores the unknown qualities embedded in materials—how histories and cultures speak to one another through texture, form, and the ephemeral. The exhibition finds its roots in Agha Shahid Ali’s poem The Dacca Gauzes, whose words evoked for Shah memories of her maternal family and the cities they inhabited. This emotional cartography spans from Chittagong to Chennai and Kochi, and across the Arabian Sea to Karachi—cities connected through personal histories and ancestral traces.

Memories, submerged in history, reach for their own measures of understanding—of things no longer ours to hold. Of Dust and Woven Air is a study in this fragile space, where absence becomes a palpable presence. Shah works with dust and its accumulations, drawing on the delicate legacy of Bengal muslin (gauze), the ethereal cloth at the heart of Ali’s poem. Through lines, forms, and materiality on paper, she reveals a quiet poetry of loss and erasure, tracing what lingers long after it has disappeared.