The name Shalimar Gardens evokes images of a paradise on Earth, a concept deeply rooted in South Asian history and culture. Against this evocative backdrop, Pakistani artist Zahra Mansoor founded Brief Shalimar in Paris in 2024 alongside three other founding members — Keerthana Karthikeyan, Demir Ramazanov and Fiona McDonnell — as a refreshing departure from the traditional French art salon.

Instead of succumbing to academic blandness, Brief Shalimar provides a dynamic platform where young artists are empowered to explore and experiment without constraint. The third edition of Brief Shalimar, ‘Tomorrow Will…’, used this idea of an ephemeral springboard, not to replicate that vision, but to explore how artists today grapple with imagining the future.

The exhibition established a conceptual link through the shared exploration of utopian ideals and the human impulse to shape a better future. Shalimar, in its historical context, represented a Mughal vision of paradise on Earth, a carefully constructed space intended to evoke beauty, harmony and abundance. ‘Tomorrow Will…’ took this impulse as a starting point, but instead of presenting a finished, idealised space, it delved into the process of envisioning a future, acknowledging the complexities, contradictions and challenges inherent in that act.

The exhibition, therefore, used Shalimar not as a visual template but as a symbolic anchor, grounding the contemporary artistic explorations in a long-standing tradition of imagining and striving for a better world. It examined how that tradition evolves when confronted with the realities of the present, including themes of displacement, identity, and social responsibility.

The third iteration of an art show in Paris, which draws inspiration from the Shalimar Gardens, grappled with the relation between a utopia and individuals wrestling with the past, present and future

The exhibition’s title served as both a prompt and a potent distillation of its central inquiry. This collective effort to imagine a future resulted in a show that carried the weight of the past, its disappointment in the present and a non-negotiable demand for responsibility for the future.

The palpable weight of the past manifested powerfully in several works, notably in Kaylyn Murphy’s Point of Impact, where she grappled with the corporeal form of pain and trauma. Through spontaneous impacts on paper, she seemed to bypass conscious articulation, allowing the body to speak directly from its unconscious depths.

Similarly, Drupad Prasad Mudda’s layered photo series meticulously charted the body’s evolving ownership — from the constraints of religious and social institutions to the pressures of conforming in adulthood.

Mercedes Loyd offered a starkly personal exploration with a poignant glimpse into her childhood through a salvaged photograph — a moment with her grandfather, nearly discarded by her mother. Overlaid with a punched outline from Orwell’s 1984, “If you are human, that is humanity”, the work drew a chilling parallel between totalitarian regimes and the dynamics of her own family.

The weight of the past resonated in the distinct approaches of Bonobithi Biswas and Shreya Jain. The former created a paradoxical ceiling crafted from jute, offering no solace, as a response to recent mass deportations of Indian students from the US. Her phrase, “Tomorrow will bring care as an act of resistance,” becomes an answer to her art piece that creates an experience of vulnerability. On the other hand, Jain delved into the intensely personal, preserving a lost piece of jewellery in a 2D screen-print, meditating on the enduring nature of objects as vessels of memory and the extension of self across different realities through modern reproduction.

This lingering weight of the past found its counterpart in expressions of present disillusionment, with the works of Clara Fortis and Valeriia Vertii. Fortis’s metalwork merged the forms of human teeth and a bear trap into a mask-like structure, a brutalist metaphor for contemporary human psychology where defence and aggression intertwine, often manifesting as a self-serving manipulation that ultimately feels lifeless. The repercussions of this individualistic essence on the natural world found a stark representation in Vertii’s work: nails driven into a cheerfully painted wooden block, a potent symbol of the jarring discord between contemporary society and nature’s inherent harmony.

Amidst this exploration of past burdens and present anxieties, a glimmer of hope emerged, a call for future responsibility articulated in the works of Keerthana Karthikeyan, Gayatri Juvekar, Terence Berchman, Zahra Mansoor and Tara-Tess Vatanpour.

Vatanpour’s dance performance is the link that connects the past with the present and pushes it into the future. It consisted of a fictional love story of two people in Iran living through regime changes and cultural shifts that brought turbulence to their emotional states, which Vatanpour represented as a separate character. The 40-minute choreography culminated in the characters’ assertion of selfhood over the oppressive regime, poignantly depicted through their interaction with symbols of emancipation — a book and a painting.

While Vatanpour brought the story of intimate relations to the front, Karthikeyan dove into the space of the unknown by asking strangers from across the globe to share their memories with another stranger in the form of audio recordings. Yet, her accompanying phrase, “Tomorrow will not bring us together”, introduced a note of scepticism, prompting reflection on the isolating potential within digital connectivity.

Berchman explored the theme of connectivity as a ‘Turing Test’ scenario, comparing two conversations: one with his partner and another with ChatGPT. He highlighted the surprising similarities in the responses and how both showed sensitivity, raising questions about the nature of connection in an age of artificial intelligence.

Expressing hope, Juvekari turned inwards, in anticipation of tomorrow, to “shine a light on parts of [one] not hidden, just waiting.” Her photograph, juxtaposing a delicate plant with the obscured private parts of a nude figure, subtly hinted at a profound connection between sexuality and nature, expressing a quiet hope for future acceptance.

On top of these promises of the future, Mansoor’s work questions for whom this ‘tomorrow’ is promised. Her cassette series titled Wohi Suna Sunaya Fasana [An old, old, old story], depicting men dominating public spaces, posed a critical question: for whom is this ‘tomorrow’ envisioned? Her work yearned for a future where unheard narratives take centre stage.

While the exhibition operated under a compelling central concept, the curation faltered in weaving an accessible narrative, forcing viewers to piece together meaning from a somewhat disjointed collection of works. Furthermore, the panel discussions missed an opportunity to delve deeper into the exhibition’s core themes, failing to provide the crucial connective thread for viewers to contextualise their experience within the broader world of Brief Shalimar.

Yet, in a departure from Shalimar’s promise of an immediate earthly paradise, ‘Tomorrow Will…’ presented a more nuanced and challenging vision of utopia — one not readily achieved but actively constructed through acknowledging historical burdens and embracing present responsibility, a testament to the evolving understanding of a hopeful future.

‘Tomorrow Will...’ was held at
Vie Projects in Paris on April 27, 2025

The writer runs the artist residency La Roseraie du Sud in Paris and is currently pursuing his Master’s in cultural anthropology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He can be reached at marooftaj917@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 18th, 2025