Solo show from the interesting NY-based Syrian-Armenian painter and video artist (who has also been a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble).
Mourad’s technique is to combine live drawing and animation in concert with musicians, developing a collaboration in which art and music harmonise with one another; the goal is to create a whole world, an invented historic exploration, to trigger memory rediscovering a universe that never existed to begin with … He has performed his animated and live visuals around the world, recently via a full-length performance to accompany the Armenia! exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and earlier this year at a residency at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
For Between Floating Worlds the artist explores the sentiments of the displaced, those who leave one world in search of a better one, but are often met with disappointment when the grass they discover is not as green as they had dreamed. His work falls into grey areas, the spaces between ‘us’ and ‘them’, old and new, a difficult past and an uncertain future, the fragile present defined by hope and anticipation, uncertainty and ambition. The pieces, produced especially for this exhibition, embody symbols of transience, travel and uncertainty – suspended creatures, ropes, and sails – with audio arranged by Argentinian composer Juan Pablo Jofre.