Salon Culture 101: Tomorrow Will Be Worse… & Other Musings - Brief Shalimar at Vie Projects
Written by Olivia Gilmore
Image Credits:
Mahibrata Das (@_.through_the_aperture._)
Gayatri Juvekar (@gayatrijuvekar)
Demir Ramazanov (@demirramazanov)
A strong and steady wave of salons is sweeping over Paris. Held in private homes and ephemeral gallery spaces alike, collectives are exhibiting artwork in intimate settings, paired with music, poetry, panel discussions — and cocktails too. Veering away from institutional support, aesthetes are bringing events to fruition on shoestring budgets, collective organization, and sheer energy.
One such salon is Brief Shalimar, named after the paradisiacal gardens of Lahore completed in 1642 to entertain the royal family’s guests. Its third edition took place at Vie Projects — the multidisciplinary gallery space of Semaine Media — on April 27th, 2025. “We were thinking about something that comes from the art community, for the art community,” said Zahra Mansoor, director and founder. It’s as if the collective, largely from Central and South Asia, has superimposed Pakistan’s Shalimar Gardens onto Paris’s urban landscape, bringing visitors into a harmonious utopia where everything is mindfully community-driven.
Installation view, Brief Shalimar Cocktails by Fiona McDonnell, 2025
Installation view, Brief Shalimar, 2025
“It’s not a hard-and-fast intellectualized curation, but more slowly guiding and generating ideas, which is more organic, and how I think an artist’s studio practice develops. Investigating the process of making art, in a way that’s meant for creative people, rather than for the viewership of buyers.”
Mansoor described this iteration as “a fluxus-type of thing.” They asked young artists — largely recent Paris art school graduates — to complete the open-ended phrase “Tomorrow will . . .” Some interpretations included:
Tomorrow will be worse
Tomorrow will be another layer of ruin, in a world that no longer
remembers its own creators
Tomorrow will come
Tomorrow will always bring light and fresh perspectives
Tomorrow will piece me back together, but never in the same shape
Tomorrow will converse with data
Tomorrow will be gentle as you are
Tomorrow will turn me into you
Installation view, Kit Szasz & Yiseul Bae, Time to vanish III, IV, Metal, Wax, Glass Object, Paracetamol, Dried Flowers, Trinkets, 20 x 14 x 3 cm, 2025
Demir Ramazanov, LOOK 1: TABLEAUX VIVANTS, Color print, 60 x 80 cm, 2025
Installation view, Brief Shalimar, 2025
Zahra Mansoor, An old, old, old story, Color ink-jet print, 29.7 x 21 cm, 2025
Refreshingly, only three of the sixteen interpretations had somewhat negative connotations. The rest were neutral, if not hopeful, perhaps reflecting how Gen Z artists feel about the not-too-distant future. The seventeen featured artists’ works were shown alongside their interpretations. The salon began with a poetry reading by Masha Krupnova and an intro from the team, was followed by roundtables about the theme, and concluded with a balletic ‘performance intervention’ produced by Tara-Tess Vatanpour.
In the front window of the gallery, displayed on a wooden bedside table, were the diptych sculptures Time to Vanish III & IV (2025) by Kit Szasz and Yiseul Bae. These works distantly recalled Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse (1936/37), in which white shoes are presented like a tied roast chicken on a silver platter. In Szasz and Bae’s pieces, however, everyday objects are placed on oval silver platters: packets of half-emptied pills and dried flowers, submerged in shallow pools of wax. They were satisfying to gaze at, with their smooth, cool exteriors and soft, yielding interiors. In Demir Ramazanov’s eerie Look 1 & 2: TABLEAUX VIVANTS (2025), glossy prints of figures draped in gauzy fabrics were accompanied by the text: “Tomorrow will stay, for just a moment longer.”
Keerthana Karthikeyan, Fragments, mixed media installation,2025
Look 1 evokes a sci-fi version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, except this time, a girl in white, her hair resembling a veil, looks out into a tar-black abyss, while in Look 2 another figure languishes in a monochromatic-rose ensemble. Fiona McDonnell served cocktails off a dessert cart, featuring clarified mango juice and jasmine sambac-infused water. Like an alchemist performing magic, a drink with rosemary turned from violet to lavender before our eyes. Keerthana Karthikeyan’s Fragments (2024) installation was dreamily nostalgic, with a CD player and track list that recall the purity of the noughties (the decade from 2000 to 2009) era. An archival project, Karthikeyan asked people online to record an important memory from their lives. Astonishingly, the subjects found it easier to open up about the intimate details of their lives to a perfect stranger; their inhibitions came down — and what emerged was an international audio archive of memories.
Kit Szasz & Yiseul Bae, Time to vanish III
The audiovisual installation Sheltering Voids (2025) by Bonobithi Biswas hovered above the heads of attendees. The subtle clanking of chains — accompanied by a low, groaning sound — resonated through the space. The work is a tribute to the 104 undocumented Indian immigrants — the “unconsoled non-voices, my fellow citizens whose bodies were shackled in iron, to leave a non-identity to enter another” — who were violently deported by Donald Trump in February 2025, as part of his mass deportation campaign. The Brief Shalimar salon wrapped up with visitors spilling out onto the sidewalk — purple drinks in hand — on the warm late-spring evening. The series will continue, pursuing the goal of making salons for artists and highlighting the work of young, contemporary creators.
Zahra Mansoor – Director, founder
Demir Ramazanov – Curation and communications lead
Keerthana Karthikeyan – Production lead
Terence Berchman – Production coordinator
Zuzanna Zagorska – Communications coordinator
Fiona McDonnell – Drinks and hospitality
Lucy Savannah Berry – Production coordinator
ARTISTS: Barbara Dronnier, Bonobithi Biswas, Clara Fortis, Demir Ramazanov, Drupad Prasad Mudda, Gayatri Juvekar
Kaylyn Murphy, Keerthana Karthikeyan, Kit Szasz & Yiseul Bae, Mercedes Loyd, Rebecca Claire Durden, Shreya Jain, Terence Berchman, Valeriia Vertii, Zahra Mansoor