Artist: Kevork Mourad

In the opening scene of Yo-Yo Ma’s documentary, The Music of Strangers, the camera drifts through the streets of Istanbul, weaving in and out of the gathering crowd as if it were part of the moment itself. Overlooking the Bosphorus, the river between Europe and Asia, musicians have banded together, their music unfurling in a weightless fervor; Ma, himself, enthralled, his fingers dancing across his cello in a delicate, improvised pizzicato. At the heart of it all, Kevork Mourad crouches low to the ground, his brush in motion, mapping music in black pigment and line over the expanse of a large canvas.

This immediacy—an unflinching trust in the hand to channel what the mind cannot—defines Mourad’s work. Whether performing in the streets with Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble or in the cavernous hush of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, his quick strokes carry a sense of augury, a cartomancy in paint. Every mark is visible, an irreversible stroke of the past solidifying into the present.

Mourad’s debut exhibition in Asia, When Time Was Like a River, at Perrotin Shanghai, extends this ethos. A river does not double back, nor does Mourad’s line. Especially in larger works like The Wave (2025), the viewer can feel how his brushstroke sweeps forward with undeniable force, carrying deposits of forgotten histories into the future.

An Armenian from Syria, Mourad has long been in dialogue with what came before. His process, devoid of reference images, is rooted in instinct, an improvisational dialogue of brushwork, printmaking, cutting, and drawing. “The more you visit the memory, the more you blur the memory,” he has said. His approach is less about re-creating the past than about allowing it to surface, unbidden, through the layered improvisations of ink and paint.

The exhibition in Shanghai unfolds in four movements: installation, work on paper, paintings, and cut-out paintings, each a meditation on lost civilizations, endurance, and the revealing architecture of memory. Among the cut-out works, When Time Was Like a River (2025), the exhibition’s eponymous painting, exemplifies Mourad’s ability to layer history within his compositions. A hand-cut, double-layered work, its back panel pays homage to the ancient city of Palmyra, a crossroads of Greco-Roman and Persian architecture, while the second layer warns of its destruction by the Islamic State. Once a vital hub along the Silk Road, Palmyra’s remnants are now further eroded by war and time. In the painting, hands reach up to support the crumbling columns, an attempt to hold history in place before it disappears altogether.

This sense of struggle, of perseverance in the face of collapse, resonates throughout the exhibition. In The Thorny Path (2025), another of his cut-out works, Mourad turns his attention to the penitential pilgrimage, an act of devotion made physical through suffering. The piece nods to Peregrinatio Etheria (The Pilgrimage of Egeria), a Latin text chronicling a Christian woman’s arduous ascent of Mount Sinai, where pilgrims, overcome with reverence and exhaustion, sometimes crawled on hands and knees. Mourad’s figures, contorted and clasping the ground, scale treacherous architectures in pursuit of the shrine that waits at the top of the canvas.

Encountering Mourad’s work in a Chinese context is particularly meaningful. Beyond shared traditions of calligraphy and ink painting, his architectural compositions echo Shanshui (山水 , “mountain- water”), the classical Chinese landscape tradition. Shanshui is not about direct representation but about Daoist philosophy—mountains as conduits to the heavens, landscapes as energetic presences. Mourad’s paintings move in a similar current, replacing mountains with staircases as symbols of spiritual ascent. His staircases, seen in The Thorny Path (2025) and Echoes of Arches (2022), recall the narrow, arduous steps of Armenian monasteries, purposefully designed to test the faith of those who climbed them.

Figures emerge and dissolve across the exhibition, their forms at once mythic and deeply personal. In The Resting Traveler (2025), a horse slowly materializes from what initially appears as an abstract composition. The work references two great thinkers: the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, who taught that all great spiritual transformations begin with an act of intention (niyyah) and a single movement toward the divine, and Laozi, the ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Daoism, who famously wrote, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

At the exhibition’s heart is Memory Gates, an immersive fabric installation completed in 2020. Suspended in space, it invites viewers to step inside, moving through corridors and archways that subtly sway with their presence. Here, history is not merely observed but inhabited. The work echoes Aleppo, Mourad’s childhood home, as well as ancient Babylon and the Ishtar Gate, populated with horses, roosters, and other animals. The script winding through the composition is a fusion of Arabic and Armenian, a language that is neither and both. The fabric itself recalls a device of protection: during the Syrian Civil War, vast sheets of cloth were suspended over streets to shield civilians from snipers.

As in Shanshui—where only black ink and paper are used— Mourad’s work speaks to a resourcefulness. His paring down of color, material, and fabrication is central to his practice. The works themselves are deceivingly nomadic. A work as monumental as Memory Gates, or his 6-meter-tall Seeing Through Babel in the Aga Khan Museum’s collection, looms over viewers with grandeur yet folds down into a small, lightweight square, like a handkerchief, small enough to fit into a backpack.

In Contemplation, a half-bird, half-man figure stands at the threshold of time, gazing at the remnants of lost civilizations. His wings hold the wisdom of the past; his eyes, the urgency of the present. He poses a fundamental question, one that carries throughout the gallery: How do we carry the beauty of the past into the present? How do we weave its vanished histories into today’s fabric before they slip away forever?

Text by Paige Haran