O zymandias: 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.
“The world was beginning to flower into wounds.”
Drawing inspiration from Shelley’s vision of ruin, fragility, and the beauty of imperfection as envisioned 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. What endures is not intact, but altered, and meaning is not found in wholeness but in the weathered, patinated, and scarred.
The distressed, salvaged garments of Greg Lauren — stitched, torn, and reassembled into a language of resilience — anchor this vision. Raised among the symbols of classic American masculinity and Hollywood glamour, Lauren repeatedly dismantles the icons he inherited: from Cary Grant’s tuxedoed sophistication to Marlon Brando’s biker archetype, or the cinematic worlds of Star Wars and Mad Max. Through this deconstruction, Lauren reveals their fragility and reconstructs them through imperfection. Fragments of military duffle bags, weathered blankets, tents, denim scraps, and discarded flannels become fractured silhouettes evoking a beauty which arises from the imperfect and a society shaped by conflict, collapse, and endurance.
“To a certain degree, this notion that you can be someone because of what you wear is what I find most interesting. It’s not that I’m rebelling against that. It’s just that I wanted to change the movie and the roles that I had played, to find a more authentic, personal feeling in my clothes. That’s when I started the collection.”
Pieces such as Duffle/Blanket Dickens and Duffle E-1 transform vintage military remnants into tailored forms juxtaposing patina and texture, marked by abrasion, repair, and accumulated history. In other pieces, such as Denim Scrap Parka and The Flannel Stitchwork GL1, discarded textile scraps and remnants are recomposed into tactile mosaics of texture and colour. As if straight out of the dystopian wardrobe of a Mad Max film, Charcoal Tent Sleeveless Brando With “Spine” Back evokes a scarred exoskeleton, an almost post-human anatomy.
His garments ultimately suggests that icons are not fixed ideals to preserve intact, but structures to be broken apart so that something more emotionally truthful can emerge.
“My collections have always been about a destroyed elegance. You don't know whether the clothes are from the past or the future.”
As Lauren’s garments enter into dialogue with the spectral portraits of Eugène Carrière and Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, 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.
Inspired by Ancient Greek sculptural ideals, Antoine Bourdelle began Tête d’Apollo in clay around 1898 while working in Auguste Rodin’s studio. Setting it aside, the sculpture was soon forgotten and discarded. Upon rediscovering the clay head in his studio, cracked and weathered by time, Bourdelle decided to embrace and preserve these fractures, cuts and marks, transforming the work into a declaration of artistic independence from Rodin — opening a radical new direction in modern sculpture.
Nearby, Georges Dorignac’s striking Soldier of Marthon (Mask) presents the human figure as a site of trauma and endurance. Created in the years preceding the First World War, the stark ink drawing anticipates the violence, mechanisation and dislocation that would consume most of the world in the decades following. This idea is further reinforced by artefacts of antiquity such as an Egyptian granite torso of a man from the 26th Dynasty, or the head of the god Min from the reign of Amenhotep III; the fragmentary Roman marble head of Artemis of Gabii, or the gray schist head of Buddha from Gandhara. The missing limbs, fractured faces and worn surfaces transform them into objects suspended between antiquity and futurity, echoing Shelley’s broken statue half-buried in sand.
This poetic archaeology finds powerful contemporary resonance in the work of Urs Fischer. Cast in bronze yet bearing the exaggerated instability and awkwardness characteristic of Fischer’s sculptural language, Big Foot (2014) appears at once monumental and absurd; a colossal appendage detached from a vanished body of an unknown civilisation. Similarly, Untitled (2014) collapses distinctions between sculpture, ruin, and painterly surface. Fischer’s reclining female torsos — vulnerable, weathered, in a state of decay — become relics of the present, as though excavated from a future civilisation already in a state of ruin. Both sculptures appear perpetually suspended in states of disintegration and transformation, giving a nod to Ballard’s imagined near future.
“Life is one long decay, no? There’s a lot of beauty in it. Like the patina in an old city.”
The fractured anatomies of Jean-Luc Moulène deepen this destabilisation of the body. Moulène’s sculptures frequently hover between the organic and the industrial, suggesting bodies altered by technological and environmental pressures. In Hump Hand (Paris, 2017), polished concrete transforms the human hand into something simultaneously anatomical and geological, as though flesh has fossilised into mineral form. Other works such as Cheval Force (2019) and Josephine (2017) appear as evolutionary remnants from an unknown future — creatures shaped by collapse rather than progress. Central to Moulène’s artistic practice is the relationship between negation and disjunction. His conceptual realisations impart material presence and give symbolic weight to things that do not fully exist, operating between absence, negation and contradiction. In their distorted corporeality, they resonate with Ballard’s recurring fascination with psychological mutation and altered states of being.
“Negation is the founding act of creation.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Andrew Luk explores environments destabilised by extraction, pressure, and entropy through works such as Deep Earth Resources No.2 (2020) and The Fragility of Things Built from Rock (2018). Where the former resembles both industrial debris and geological formation, the latter confronts the tension between concrete and expanding foam, both materials associated with construction. Luk’s practice consistently interrogates humanity’s attempt to impose permanence upon matter, only to reveal the inherent instability underlying such ambitions. His works function as landscapes after collapse: fragile, improvised, and resistant to resolution.
Presented alongside the visual works in the exhibition is a literary curation populated by prophetic texts of worlds collapsed and remade; from the scorched authoritarian futures of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the brutal psychic landscape of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, to the fragmented spiritual desolation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Other texts in the exhibition further expand this constellation of myth and apocalypse. The 1672 English edition of Nostradamus’ True Prophecies or Prognostications introduces an early modern obsession with catastrophe and prediction, while Gilgamesh: King of Erech recalls one of humanity’s oldest surviving epics — itself a meditation on mortality, civilisation, and the search for permanence. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist enters this dialogue, its vision of industrial poverty and social fragmentation anticipating many of the anxieties of modern urban life. Together, these books become parallel ruins within the exhibition, providing a literary scenography of a civilisation suspended between ruin and reinvention.
"To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”
Bringing a further sensory layer of experience, the rhythmic, industrial soundscape of Front 242 — the pioneering Belgian music group synonymous with Electronic Body Music — punctures the exhibition. Pulsating beats and haunting vocals amplify the dystopic narrative of collapse, endurance and transformation. Their music transforms the exhibition into an immersive environment in which visitors move not simply through a gallery, but through the psychic architecture of a speculative future.
Moving through Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future, the visitor becomes both witness and wanderer in a world that feels at once archaeological and post-apocalyptic, rendered from the ruins of the past and the myths of a speculative future. Ancient fragments converse with contemporary ruins; prophetic literature encounters industrial sound; bodies dissolve into geological matter. Across these encounters, the exhibition proposes that the future may not emerge through visions of technological perfection, but through the persistence of damaged forms and unstable memories. In this world, beauty survives not despite ruin, but because of it, echoing a sentiment often attributed to Aristotle: “In our flaws, we find our humanity.”
