Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future is an invitation into an encounter arising from the collision between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vision of fallen empires and J. G. Ballard’s worlds of psychic and environmental collapse. Bridging fashion, literature, music, ancient sculpture and modern and contemporary art, the exhibition imagines a near future in which the present is already becoming a poetic archaeology where myths are formed through decay, fragmentation, and survival.

Drawing inspiration from Shelley’s vision of ruin, fragility and the beauty of imperfection as premised in his 1818 sonnet Ozymandias, and Ballard’s proposition that dystopian catastrophe does not end culture, but remakes it, Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future offers a Mad Max-esque world where meaning is forged in the wake of collapse. Here, beauty is no longer pristine; it is weathered, patinated, and scarred. What endures is not intact, but altered.

The distressed, salvaged garments of Greg Lauren — stitched, torn, and reassembled into a language of resilience — anchor this vision. Entering into dialogue with the spectral portraits of Eugène Carrière, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle and Georges Dorignac, alongside fragmentary heads from Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt — the exhibition unfolds as a gathering of unlikely figures: part relic, part survivor, part apparition. These figures, in turn, emerge as unlikely models for Lauren’s garments.

Venue address: Landmark Chater, 8 Connaught Road Central, Central