Superior firepower, for now: Seher Shah at Nature Morte Berlin

“The Expansion Complex of the First Great Ornamental Age,” Seher Shah's new series of digital prints at Nature Morte Berlin lifts images from the sepia-toned archive of yesteryear—a black-and-white news photo, an aerial view of a city, a rigid portrait in an antique studio—and tweaks them, splitting and embroidering them with geometric designs at the edges, creating an effect that is somehow simultaneously old-fashioned—like a death-letter edged in lacy black—and coldly formal and distanced, obeying a fractal logic of its own, insistently reminding the viewer that in this series, the artist has inverted the mediatic tension that drove through many of the best drawings in her celebrated Jihad Pop exhibition. "Progression 1", from that series, uses the simplest materials—graphite and paper—to create a highly precise mathematical sci-fi dreamscape, exploding in bold against constraining graph-paper boxes of evanescent gray pencil that refuse us an unmediated viewing, and keep us at a remove. This is an image that one would expect to see realized on a computer screen; the ghostly presence of the graph paper lines, fading in and out like fabric, subvert that expectation and restore the aura of the analogue to an otherwise digital dream.

In the prints of her new series, by contrast, Shah employs explicitly digital instruments for a dig through archival materials, creating revisionary—almost steampunk—retakes on vintage Victorian, imperialist aesthetics of power. In this, they hearken back to the Concrete Oracles series of 2008, a set of eight prints where tombs and obelisks cast long black shadows over tiny passersby in monumental, darkly utopian public spaces. In two images from that series, mausoleum interiors, bookended and symmetrical, unfold with a patterned precision; Shah shows us not the coffin, but the cenotaph of the absent ruler, hollow and public. Some weird dark energy emanates from the black cube at the center, some nullity.

Shah works with an occult visual physics, with force fields. Indeed, some of the artist's work—like the Black Star Project—remain so abstract, so visionary as to approach the formal and mysterious line-making mysticism of Nasreen Mohamedi. The deep “interior courtyard” spaces of the self become cosmic theater, where collisions between hard-edged utopian geometries, densely coded symbolic forms, hot gases and dark currents of graphite manifest, fracture and dissolve. The colonnaded tomb's cool marble explodes into spinning fireballs and burning clouds, its atmosphere of stillness, absence and death shattered by cubes and crosses and lava bombs.


The “Expansion Age” series turns us back toward the public world, toward a shared imaginary built around interchangeable images of soldiers, business partners, and cityscapes, where the turbulent and private theological passions brewing in interior courtyards are barely visible, patrolled and kept in check—for now—by superior firepower, if not hegemony. “The Horned God” (2009), from the series on display at Nature Morte, presents an altered scene from the archive: colonial soldiers line up for inspection beneath a huge blank sky, as a Janus-like mirrored pair of officers looks on with a salute. An obelisk crowned with a horned orb towers behind and above them all, like a malevolent wizard's wand, pulsating with self-similar digital swirls and emitting a cone of black electricity at a heaven stripped of gods.

"The Expansion Complex of the First Great Ornamental Age" is part of a group show with Anita Dube, June Glasson and Hema Upadhyay, currently on view at Nature Morte Berlin, until October 31st. All images remain copyright of the artist.