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.

Read full essay here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B67UD1usYjs5kxk2L3ttMh4T4vs7B1M3/view