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])

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.