An Article by C. N. (1078 words, 6 min. read)
The Home That Follows Us
What happens to a homeland when we leave it behind? Does it vanish in silence, or does it follow us—reshaped by longing, recreated through memory? In Imaginary Homeland, Kevork Mourad answers this question not with certainty, but with poetry. His solo exhibition at Galerie Tanit in Beirut unfolds like a murmured story stitched into fabric, where memory and architecture are inseparable, where absence becomes presence.
Mourad paints not on conventional canvas, but on materials that already carry history: cotton, denim, linen. These are not neutral grounds; they are worn and intimate, evocative of labor, tenderness, and domestic life. In his hands, they become more than surfaces. They become vessels of emotion, relics of the everyday, textures of the exiled. Through layers of color and form, Mourad builds a visual language rooted in displacement yet blooming with resilience.
A Boat Suspended Between Worlds
At the heart of the exhibition hangs Sailing to Nowhere, a sculptural installation of striking emotional weight. Suspended like a phantom caught mid-voyage, this ten-foot-high boat hovers above the floor, its bottom open, unable to anchor. Its sails, painted in crimson and black acrylic on cotton, carry architectural fragments from Mesopotamian civilizations; arched windows, ancient forms layered into a triptych of historical depth.
But it is what drifts beneath the boat that most haunts the viewer: twenty to thirty passport-sized portraits, dangling and turning with the air. They are not anonymous. They are connected—by blood, by myth, by memory—to the ancient cultures whose ruins still speak. The installation is Mourad’s response to the refugee crisis past and present: a meditation on the pain of leaving, the impossibility of return, and the ghosts we carry across borders.
This sculptural piece was first shown in 2024 at the Sheen Center in New York, as part of an initiative fostering intercultural dialogue during a symposium on refugees. It is not only a visual work, it is a cry, a lament, a floating memorial to those who drowned seeking safety, and those still searching for solid ground.
Painting with Fabric, Memory, and Time
Mourad’s entire practice is built on layering; visually, emotionally, culturally. His works on denim and linen are not static images but layered timelines. Like lives built in exile, these paintings hold multiple histories: the texture of the fabric, the language of the brush, the memory of what’s been lost.
Each surface breathes. Denim speaks of labor and endurance. Linen whispers of fragility and care. Cotton stretches like a skin across the invisible wounds of migration. Mourad transforms these textiles into monuments, not to grand events, but to intimate, daily acts of survival: a kitchen’s warmth, a lullaby passed down, the curve of handwritten script from a fading notebook.
In this world of layered textiles, color itself becomes a carrier of emotion. Crimson echoes urgency and bloodlines. Black grounds the works in mourning. Together, they form a language beyond words; a language of continuity, even in rupture.
As the artist himself has said: “Art holds a responsibility to document time, so that future generations may understand what it meant to live, to dream, and to endure in the moment of its making.” In every layered surface and suspended figure, this sense of responsibility pulses like a quiet heartbeat.
Between Myth and Ruin
Mourad’s work often draws from the mythic as a means of anchoring memory in something timeless. In Imaginary Homeland, he invokes the figure of Saint Simeon Stylites, the holy man who lived atop a column near Aleppo. The pillar once seen as absurd became sacred (pilgrims chipped off pieces to eat, hoping for fertility). In Mourad’s art, the sacred and absurd coexist, much like the refugee experience; an existence between dignity and desperation.
In the main space of the exhibition, the monumental Tree of Life stretches across fabric like a spiritual fresco. Its roots and branches are not just botanical, they are ancestral. They represent the cyclical nature of loss and rebirth, exile and homecoming, rupture and resilience.
Amid the grandeur of installations and mythic references, a quieter series of 24 small color paintings offers a tender reflection on our relationship with the land. These intimate works honor the slow rhythms of planting and harvesting, tracing the dialogue between soil and hand. Through vibrant pigments and delicate gestures, Mourad evokes a sense of rootedness (even in exile), reminding us that while homes may be lost, the act of nurturing the earth can still ground us in continuity and care.
An Artist Between Continents
Kevork Mourad’s life echoes the very themes of his work. Born in Kameshli, Syria, of Armenian descent, and trained at the Yerevan Institute of Fine Art, he now lives in New York. His journey across cultures and continents has shaped an artistic voice rooted in hybridity, memory, and witness.
Mourad’s work has been exhibited and performed in some of the world’s most prestigious venues: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. His installations and animations have accompanied global orchestras, such as the Silkroad Ensemble, with whom he has collaborated for two decades.
His multimedia work Seeing Through Babel is part of the permanent collection at the Aga Khan Museum. He is also featured in The Music of Strangers, a documentary by Oscar-winner Morgan Neville, which profiles boundary-breaking musicians from around the world. His art has been shown at the Asia Society Triennial, the Paris Art Fair, the Spurlock Museum, and the Rose Art Museum, among many others. In 2025, he also exhibited with Perrotin in Shanghai, further cementing his place on the international stage.
Carrying the Invisible
In Imaginary Homeland, Mourad does not offer closure. Instead, he offers remembrance. His art becomes a sacred act of witnessing; a way of holding space for those who had to leave, for histories that have been buried, and for cultures often reduced to rubble.
“What do we carry when we are forced to leave?” the artist seems to ask with every brushstroke. His answer is layered: we carry our songs, our ancestors, our ruins, and our dreams. We carry the scent of home-cooked meals, the lines of forgotten prayers, the softness of worn fabrics.
And we carry them not only in our minds, but in the art that dares to remember them.
