Curatorial Essay

Fridman Gallery presents Mad Heart, Be Brave, a group exhibition curated by Sadaf Padder and inspired by the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001),  known for his lyrical reflections on longing, memory, and terrain—both literal and emotional. The title of the exhibition, drawn from Ali’s poetry, becomes a call to inhabit the vulnerable terrain of longing while holding space for imagination. In invoking Kashmir—its history, its contested borders, and its people’s persistent hope—the exhibition pays homage to a region marked by profound beauty, military occupation, contested borders and enduring political rupture. Ali’s vision of Kashmir as homeland and a site of fracture and possibility – becomes a generative metaphor throughout the exhibition.

To invoke Kashmir as a frame, then, is to resist forgetting and invisibility. It is to assert that even in the most surveilled and silenced regions, the act of remembering and re-envisioning—through poetry, sound, pigment, and story—is a radical form of presence. In Mad Heart, Be Brave, artists from across the globe respond to this call. Though their origins and mediums differ, they gather around the poetic force of Ali’s vision, using myth, memory, and material as tools to build, unearth, and reclaim. Kashmir becomes more than a place—it becomes a lens.

Featuring artists working across painting, sculpture, video, sound, and mixed media, Mad Heart, Be Brave challenges received ideas of home, proposing instead a fluid, generative space shaped by rupture, return, and reinvention. The exhibition catalyzes landscapes, mythologies, and objects into vehicles of self-determination, engaging both place-making and space-making as acts of reclamation. Through hyperlocal and ancestral materials, time-honored practices, and mythic imagination, the artists trace nonlinear histories and assemble new constellations of belonging.

Artists Arleene Correa Valencia, Kwesi Kwarteng, Ruth Jeyaveeran, and Alia Ali reclaim traditional materials and formats—such as amate paper, wool, and textiles—once used to document migration and ritual, transforming them into conduits of living memory and cultural interconnectedness. These works invoke the visual and tactile language of survival, using the handmade as a site of protest and proof of continued existence.

Others, such as Laurena Fineus, Azadeh Nia, Zelmiro Rizo, Saks Afridi and Farah Mohammad engage in myth-making through symbolic architectures and reconstructed landscapes. Memory becomes spatial, processed through layered imagery, hybrid forms, and the poetic use of pigment and repetition. Through dreamlike compositions, these artists reflect on cities, rooms and lands remembered and reimagined. 

Arghavan Khosravi expands the visual language of Persian miniatures, reworking aesthetic codes to center stories of resistance, transformation, and gendered subjectivity. Traditional margins and frames are disrupted or dissolved altogether. Figures—once sidelined or veiled—emerge as central agents in surreal backdrops. Recurring motifs such as mirrors, and thread suggest paradoxical states: of captivity and freedom, fragmentation and repair, visibility and concealment. Chitra Ganesh and Sahana Ramakrishnan also borrow from classical traditions, such as Barahmasa miniature and Tanjore painting, collapsing time into nonlinear, dreamlike sequences. Drawing from myth, historical references, and explorations of the environment, their works construct palimpsests of personal cosmologies and symbolic worlds—often peopled by hybrid beings and fluid iconographies. Here, the sacred and the subconscious intertwine.

Zeerak Ahmed’s sound installation emerges as a portal to matrilineal histories and suppressed archives. The soundscape recovers songs, voices, and rhythms that once animated domestic and sacred spaces— fractured by migration and political rupture. These sounds do not simply recall, they carry – feminine resilience and the will to transmit.

Material hybridity plays a central role throughout. Shuyi Cao fuses organic and synthetic matter—sea glass, coral bones, salvaged metal and plastic—into sculptures that resemble fossils from imagined futures. These paradoxical objects evoke drift, ecological rupture, and spiritual inheritance. They are maps not of nations, but of migrations—of tide, memory, and erosion.

Mad Heart, Be Brave does not seek to resolve the tension between loss and becoming—the works gathered here dwell within it and harness myth and memory as co-conspirators. The exhibition offers an internal map spanning many places—where emotional and mythic landscapes guide the compass, and each work is a gesture toward home. Memory is not simply a return—it becomes the architecture from which we build onward.