LONDON.- Fridman Gallery presents Mad Heart, Be Brave, a group exhibition curated by Sadaf Padder and inspired by Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), known for his lyrical reflections on longing, memory and emotional terrain.
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 the mythic imagination, the artists trace nonlinear histories and assemble new constellations of belonging.
“If home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here—and always a missed land.” – Agha Shahid Ali, Promised Lands (2001).
Arleene correa Valencia uses traditional Amate paper to connect ancestral and present-day migrations, exploring how losing can be a noble, communal act of resistance and resilience in the face of displacement. Inspired by the Codex Boturini, these scrolls honor her community’s enduring strength and the painful complexities of returning home.
Shahzia Sikander transforms drawing into a meditative space where language, identity, and geography intertwine, using ink and poetry to explore the shifting boundaries between freedom and confinement. Inspired by a Mirza Ghalib ghazal, the work reflects on how our dreams and constraints shape us, inviting viewers to see these borders as fluid rather than fixed.
Shuyi Cao interweaves organic and synthetic materials—like seashells, coral, driftwood, and recycled plastic—into hybrid forms that blur boundaries between the natural and the man-made. Through these assemblages, she transforms fragments into imaginative beings that evoke ecological flux, myth-making, and the restless state of contemporary matter.
Sahana Ramakrishnan weaves myth, science, and personal storytelling to examine our connections to the “Other,” layering oil and mixed media in works inspired by Global South mythologies and South Asian painting traditions. Her richly detailed surfaces, often adorned with gold leaf and rhinestones, evoke reverence and transformation.
Arghavan Khosravi reimagines Persian miniature painting and manuscript illustration, using intricate compositions, symbolic dualities, and layered iconography to explore themes of visibility, concealment, and feminist critique. Combining traditional aesthetics with contemporary narratives, she reconstructs historical motifs to question patriarchy, foreground re-gendered figures, and reveal hidden power within fragmented identities.
Azadeh Nia translate psychological states into richly symbolic scenes, balancing beauty with undercurrents of tension and unease. Her layered compositions often weave cultural landmarks, subtle human traces, and narrative clues to evoke memories, storytelling, and the charged feeling of looking and being looked at.
Kwesi O. Kwarteng weaves together diverse textiles from around the world as symbolic “voices” in a global dialogue, celebrating cultural distinctiveness while highlighting shared connections. Through layered patterns, colors, and fabrics rich with meaning, his textile works become hospitable spaces of storytelling.
Laurena Finéus explores Black geographies, maroon thought, and migratory histories through imagined painterly landscapes that reframe distance and inaccessibility as generative spaces. Drawing on Haitian sites, folklore, and historical critique, she collapses time and place to question how memory, myth, and history are constructed and narrated.
Ruth Jeyaveeran leyers fibers like sediment to hold time, memory, and place. Through this tactile process, the wool transforms into textured landscapes and organic maps that trace geological forms, migration routes, and the body’s imprint.
Farah Mohammad layers printmaking, painting, and archival imagery. Through intricate compositions, she explores how familial and political histories shape inner worlds and open pathways for self-inquiry and compassion.
Saks Afridi creates sculptural hybrids that blur the line between memory, technology, and ancestral tradition. he weaves cultural symbolism with speculative futures where love and identity live in both heart and machine.
Sadaf Padder is a Brooklyn-based independent curator whose work spans the U.S., from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Martha’s Vineyard. Her curatorial practice explores climate change and neo-mythology, drawing on her background as a public school educator to build bridges across communities.
Padder’s projects have been featured in LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and Art News, and have led to acquisitions of BIPOC women artists by institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the Nion McEvoy Foundation, and RISD Museum.
She has contributed writing to Visual AIDS, ARTSY, Up Mag, and Hyperallergic, and is a Create Change alumna with the Laundromat Project, a 2022–23 Emily J. Hall Tremaine Fellow, and a featured ARTSY curator. She serves on the boards of the Vera List Center, 12 Gates Arts, and Grown in Haiti.
