Every time I visit Delhi from Colombo, which has been my primary home for three decades, I fight sensory overwhelm—vehicles honking, the smell of dusty and polluted air, children begging in traffic. And yet, upon leaving, I feel despair: returning to Colombo brings about my loss of independence and reminds my islanded self of how a weak passport limits my mobility. But every time my four-hour flight lands in Delhi, a yearning shows up, for intellectual, cultural, and creative stimulation, all of which could remain unfulfilled. Between the historic and the urban—and in every case, its confidence—I experience Delhi fully in its metamorphic personality. I feel this as I land. I pause to listen to the city.
In the note titled “City of Those Who Listen in the Dark,” from her portfolio Notes from a City Unknown (2021), Seher Shah writes “to those with broken limbs and pierced lungs,” asking them, “What is your measure to listen?” The question is directed to the inhabitants of Delhi, a city whose political turmoil she has personally experienced. The accompanying drawing of the note—light-gray geometric shapes, against an inky field of black—recalls a comma, signifying a temporary pause. It mimics Shah’s relationship to home, defined by an innate flux over almost two decades of her practice. Shah began drawing notes and recording her personal reflections in 2014 to capture the fragility of life in India’s capital through its intangible notions and mundane elements: its hidden lanes, its metro crowds, its heartbeats, movements, and smells. The portfolio of thirty-two visual and textual reflections by Shah depicts Delhi as a city in which darkness comes and goes, yet one that relentlessly moves and listens. The series reflects a part of her practice that Shah calls “drawing her way into writing.” The short poetic observations in text are anecdotal and haunting, reminding us that the daily experience of Delhi differs greatly for the people of the city based on their class, caste, gender, and religion. The portfolio’s black-and-white palette depicts abstract geometric forms, inspired by Shah’s daily sensory and emotional experiences of the city, and influenced by her background in architecture. She developed the works comprising Notes from a City Unknown during heightened, suffocating surveillance amid the rising power of a fundamentalist Hindu regime in Delhi, which continues today. Surveillance is present in the city in the forms of catcalling, CCTV cameras in invisible locations, gated communities with heightened security, and massive state-led construction projects continuing amidst pollution and insufficient urban and infrastructural planning. In a video about Notes from a City Unknown, she speaks of “grasping for a sense of understanding” about the city and its duality—people breathe in spite of direct and indirect surveillance, discrimination, violence, and erasure.
Seher Shah, Notes from a City Unknown (portfolio of 32 screen-prints on paper in custom box), 2021. Photo: Randhir Singh.
When I first encountered Shah’s Notes from a City Unknown (2019), I had just left a curatorial job in Colombo. I was (and still am) an emerging art writer trying to unlearn my craft in order to relearn it, and I was working at an art museum as a curator at its education desk. My work involved taking art to people and representing the institution and its larger vision.
I now want to engage with work deeply and for as long as I can, before taking it to others. And, through episodes of chronic depression, I was also begging for a momentary pause to listen mindfully. This meant turning my attention to practices I was passionate about. I began spending long hours staring at Shah’s prints and getting lost in them. I wrote to her to try and make sense of a fierce connection I had developed with her work, and, through relating to her work, a fierce connection I had developed with Delhi.
Since her first solo exhibition in 2007, Shah has been exploring the infinitude of home in relation to multiple cities: Karachi, where she is from, as well as Lahore, New York, Glasgow, London, Chittagong, Kochi, and Chennai. Shah’s Notes from a City Unknown springs from Delhi having become a haven of chosen family for her. We share this as an artist and a writer who have been getting acquainted over a year. She ended a recent conversation with me saying, “Perhaps, the idea of home is in between the constellations of voices, and the people and places I hold dear. And in the end, we are always [still] searching.”
In March 2025, I exited Delhi disgruntled: I would miss the view from my friends’ new apartment in the spring, with pink bougainvillea blossoming. In Delhi’s fast pace, I had finally found a way to slow down. I was also beginning to understand how home can be an affective expanse. This understanding now allows me to feel connection, contentedness, and freedom in the minute, the enormous, and the in-between. Shah’s cues about Delhi nights in Notes from a City Unknown form descriptors of a home in the city’s mundane silences. For example, in the Note titled City of Quiet Souls, she refers to a family of day-laborers who sleep inside a ghost at night: a house they will never experience fully upon completing its construction. The accompanying visual holds light grey spaces resembling a building under construction, while the black penetrates in shapes that appear like structured wooden beds. The family are absent in the image yet present in the text.
Seher Shah, Night: IX, 2018. Copyright and courtesy the artist.
I pause and focus on the absences that signal the expanse of home. I see this in terms of South Asia’s postcolonial existence in Shah’s series Argument from Silence (2019), a portfolio of ten polymer photogravure prints, developed in collaboration with Alistair Gow, master printmaker at the Glasgow Print Studio in Scotland. The absence of color is potent, signifying silencing, removal of agency, and erasure. Shah used photographic images of stone-made Gandhara sculptures, working with the architectural photographer Randhir Singh. She made controlled and uncontrolled marks in oil, treating each as a site of scarring, intervention, and disturbance. The graphite of the sculptures, the lightness of the paper, and the oils on its surface merge organically. The series highlights the British colonizers’ removal of Gandhara art from its original contexts, starting in the 1800s. Gandhara, the ancient region located in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, was influenced by vicissitudes of Persian, Syrian, Greek, and Indian cultures. While the Government Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh own over 600 Gandhara sculptures, several hundreds of others were taken by the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Argument from Silence, the current cultural and political moments and movements in South Asia demand the repatriation of similar sculptures. The series preserves the multiple histories of South Asia as a pre-Partition representation of home, reinterpreted in the current context of repatriation. It helps me cultivate hope by imagining South Asia as a region that was perhaps once a utopia without ethnic, religious, and linguistic tensions.
Seher Shah, Argument from Silence; 2019 (installation view and image courtesy of the Lyon Biennale: manifesto of fragility. Photo: Amande Dionne, 2022).
Despite today’s political chaos in South Asia and beyond, it is with a similar hopefulness that Shah’s practice exists and travels. The thirty-two Notes live inside an easily portable box-style portfolio. While on display at the 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India, the texts were translated into Malayalam; in 2023, they were translated into Mandarin for the Taipei Biennial; and in 2024 they were translated into Arabic at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia. Each region and its audiences have their own political urgencies. In these contexts, the Notes assumed their own homes, embracing their title of being about any “city unknown,” not just Delhi.
In the unknown and evolving expanse of my home, the role of writing has shifted. Because my encounters with Shah’s works have been through regular correspondence and reflection for over a year, I hold them with attachment and fascination. During my most recent visit to Delhi I would message Shah photos of moments and places that reminded me of her, and she would respond with more recommendations for things to do and places to explore.
My correspondence with Shah and our shared vulnerabilities have now extended to my daily routine as a writer. I carry a notebook to make my own intimations of places I inhabit, art I see, and books I read. Just as Shah had “drawn her way into writing,” I draw from this affective expanse to craft my own. I am no longer afraid to describe the affective nature of an artwork; I try to be fully present to its effects and am actively thinking about the destination my writing could reach—even if it remains within the confines of my notebook. But perhaps most of all, and in response to both the chaotic and the calm, I am increasingly pausing to ask myself, what is my measure to listen?
