Imagining New Futures: KAVI GUPTA | WASHINGTON BLVD. FL.2

Working across painting and mixed media, each artist reconstructs inherited narratives — mythological, cultural, ecological, personal — into new visions of what might come next. Together, their works propose that imagining a new reality is itself an act of resistance, and that the futures we picture are built from the pasts we choose to carry forward.

Karachi-based multidisciplinary artist Haya Zaidi works at the convergence of Indo-Persian miniature painting, mixed media, and contemporary feminist discourse. Grounding her practice in the visual and literary lineages of South Asia, Zaidi examines how the brown female body becomes a contested site of inheritance, mythology, and resistance. Through intricate symbolism and layered narrative, she reconfigures archetypal imagery to articulate a selfhood shaped by both cultural memory and the psychic interiority of womanhood — imagining new futures for figures long confined to the margins of historical representation.

Shahpari Rahmani is an Iranian painter whose work maps the psychic terrain of contemporary life through a highly textural, expressive visual language. Trained in Graphic Design, Painting, and a Master's in Painting at Alzahra University, Rahmani builds chromatic, atmospheric fields that oscillate between abstraction and figuration. Her surfaces carry the imprint of layered gestures, unruly marks, and spectral silhouettes, evoking states of uprising, rupture, and renewal. Across her paintings, the figure often appears dissolved or reconstituted — an emblem of both vulnerability and insistence, and a visual proposition for what comes after collapse.

Alemeh Bagherian draws on the Shahnameh, the 11th-century Persian epic composed by the poet Ferdowsi, a repository of Persian language and identity that emerged in defiance of efforts to suppress it after the Islamic conquest. By weaving Shahnameh imagery into her paintings, Bagherian affirms and reclaims her cultural heritage, her meticulous attention to detail bringing a captivating intricacy to each piece. Her figures convey a layered mix of sensuality, introspection, pleasure, and pain — ancient stories reanimated as living, forward-looking testimony.

Inka Essenhigh is renowned for dreamlike paintings that translate intuition and encounters with contemporary society into arabesque, enamel-rendered visions — at once otherworldly and close to home, idyllic yet unsettled. Essenhigh's 2019 Kavi Gupta solo exhibition, Uchronia, imagined a hypothetical future in which humanity had resolved its troubled relationship with the ecosphere — not as a complete utopian picture, but in fragments that ask how much of what we see is symbolic, abstracted, or literal. That same generative uncertainty — the future as something sketched rather than settled — continues to animate her work in Imagining New Futures.

Together, Zaidi, Rahmani, Bagherian, and Essenhigh model four distinct paths toward the same horizon: reworking myth, memory, and material into new visions of what a life, a body, or a world might yet become.

Kavi Gupta amplifies voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history. Through innovative and ambitious exhibitions, multimedia programming, and rigorous publications, we foster an evolving conversation among international communities about art and ideas.