Seher Shah and Randhir Singh

Studies in Form, Dentsu Head Office

Back to collections
Seher Shah and Randhir Singh, Studies in Form, Dentsu Head Office, 2018, Cyanotype prints on Arches Aquarelle paper, dimensions variable. Photo by Randhir Singh. Art Jameel Collection.

Artwork Details

Artist

Seher Shah and Randhir Singh

Title

Studies in Form, Dentsu Head Office

Date

2018

Medium

Cyanotype prints on Arches Aquarelle paper

Dimensions

Dimensions variable

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection. Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit (2018)

Work Description

Studies in Form explores the Brutalist architecture through a series of cyanotype prints. The cyanotype was one of the first photographic printmaking processes, developed in the 19th century and a precursor to the blueprint. Working with this printmaking process, Shah and Singh focus on four unique buildings that grouped into chapters. The Dentsu Head Office (Kenzi Tange, Tokyo, 1967) here, Akbar Bhavan (Shivnath Prasad, New Delhi, 1969), Barbican Estate (Chamberlin Powell and Bon, London, 1976) and the Brownfield Estate (Erno Goldfinger, London, 1970).

Artist Biography

Seher Shah (b. 1975) Lives and works in Barcelona.

Working across drawing, printmaking, sculpture and writing, Seher Shah’s practice speaks to the poetics of how we perceive the landscape around us. Through the historical and intimate, and in between the architectural, political, and personal, she explores the abstraction of space through states of absence, fragility and fragmentation. Her studies on absence explore architectural perspective drawing traditions, fractured histories of objects and their erasure, alongside marks that retain the traces of time through real and imagined spaces. Working with variations of line, depth, and flatness, through graphite and ink, charcoal and dust, cast concrete and iron, her works are dedicated to the intimacy of mark-making through surfaces and their material weight.

Seher Shah received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. Alongside her practice, she is involved in two long-term exchanges which bind relationships between architecture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. She has collaborated with architectural photographer, Randhir Singh, on a series of cyanotype studies in form. And since 2014, with the Glasgow Print Studio, through the printmaking processes of intaglio, photogravure and woodcut through several published works. Her works can be found in collections ranging from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queens Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai; The Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection, Dubai; Hallen für Neue Kunst, Schauffhausen; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, New Delhi; and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Vienna amongst others.

Randhir Singh (b.1976) lives and works in Barcelona.

Randhir Singh received his Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Science degrees from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York in 1999. He spent 15 years working in New York City at a number of award-winning architecture and design firms while taking photography classes at the International Center of Photography. Randhir’s practice draws on his education as an architect with a focus on issues related to architecture and urbanism. Over the last four years, Randhir has been photographing government housing colonies in Delhi. This on-going project, CPWD (Central Public Works Department), explores a number of concepts including housing typologies, socialism, government control, modernism and national identity.