ArteSpace

(excerpt)

Though tinged with the quality of lateness, it is neither early nor late—but rests somewhere in the middle. Seher Shah’s Ruined Score (2020) sits uneasily with other works in the corpus. The etchings sustain the monochromatic intensity of her practice, where the solidity of ink is girded to the appearance of lines, and there is a commitment to discovering the dialectics of printmaking as medium, matter and process. But beyond this, it is an itinerant work, orbiting alongside – but distinct from – the other works Shah has developed that are overt explorations of modernist legacies and socio-political anxieties in South Asia.

Ruined Score is not a straightforward work, in fact its beginnings lie in negation. At first the etchings appear to resemble the form of staves, but there are no notations and the sections are irregular and far too many. While recalling the structure of sheet music which hosts notes and time signatures, the forms in Ruined Score signify other terrains. Perhaps these are traces of concrete palimpsests, outlines of the dense urban environments of Karachi and Delhi, two cities that exert themselves upon Shah’s enquiries, appearing with an underlying unease as home, subject, interlocutor, and foil. Conventional notations rarely appear, and if they do, are driven by errancy and overpowered by a Dickensenian carnival of marks, arrows, vertical punctuations, scratches, slanted hyphens, and the smudgy traces of the printmaking process, as hazy remnants of contact and imprint. The title suggests a preceding moment of deformity—the score is ruined; it is difficult to extricate from this devolved state what may once have been perfectly ripened sound. We are not witness to the process of ruination but we inherit its aftermath.

But what marks this ruining within the score? Is it the defiant staves, arbitrarily transecting each other to produce the visual experience of loudness, of sonic blur, of cacophony? Drawing from Shah’s architectural eye, these prints suggest the incoherence of our packed, built worlds, one dense mass of buildings pressing into another. Amidst the suffocating lack of space, precarious proximities, and archipelagos of capital, a fragile commons is lit ablaze by the high octave pitch of ethnonationalist loudspeakers. The work doesn’t attempt to rehabilitate any of these interpretive possibilities, and if anything, suggests the fundamental discordance at the heart of the modernist imaginary; rupturing its false claims to universality by taking the scaffolding of a language and distorting it into incoherence. Its most potent gesture is to absent all the notational symbols, vacating the prints of the very hinges which hold the language of music—the staves, lacking any notes, are both empty and transformed, closer to resembling tangled electrical wires, erratic blueprints, rough outlines of an urban horizon.

Ruined Score holds all this and more—and offers no synthesis, asking us to dwell in the tensions of this multiplicity, to follow its warbled cartographies. It is asking us to proceed without a compass.