Imaginary Cities: Chapter IV

16.02.2022 – 30.03.2022

An exhibition by Kevork Mourad in collaboration with musician Anna Garano.

Imprisoned by the absurd reality we are living in currently, we dream. Between the elusive past and the illusive future we imagine, reinvent, project and explore the possibilities of utopic cities.
Imaginary Cities is a project that unfolds in chapters: Collaborations exploring cities through the prism of reveries and realities, fluidity and friction, the magical, the playful, and the futuristic…
Armenian-Syrian artist Kevork Mourad (b. 1970, Syria) is a painter who fuses printmaking, animation, and collaborative performance to bear witness to painful and continuing histories.
In his allusions to calligraphy, textiles, and the ancient architecture of Palmyra, Bosra, and Aleppo, Mourad engages deeply with the historical texture of his homeland. His art is both a vital act of remembering and a poetic expression of creativity in the face of tragedy.
Mourad works in the immediate black-on- white of newsprint, draftsmanship, and rapid sketches, sweeping paint squeezed from a tiny bottle into expressive lines with his finger or brush producing a sort of symbolist reportage. His marks, quick and final, shift across boundaries of figuration and abstraction, creating an exquisite tension between the beauty of his own process and the relentless destruction and fragmentation that are his theme.

Artist Statement
An Armenian born in Syria, I draw from the dual influences of my heritage. The stories of my home country seep into my pieces, which have become meditations on violence, its redundancy in the region of my ancestors, and the ways to climb out of it toward peace.
I want to explore the role of memories as the inheritance of trauma, the troubled relationship between remembering and forgiveness.
The descendant of genocide survivors, I am fascinated by the idea of what refugees carry with them, how the artifacts that they create hold the history of their suffering, and how my own art fits into the tradition of holding onto or surpassing loss through creation.
My goal is to work in both my media of painting, video, and live performance to find the way for hope and inspiration in the face of repeated disaster.
Kevork Mourad

Kevork Mourad
Time Immemorial, 2018
Acrylic on cotton fabric
600 x 280 x 80 cm

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