Kevork Mourad - Sailing to Nowhere

Thursday March 19 / 6-8.30 pm

Performance Kevork Mourad 7.30 pm

Sailing to Nowhere brings together a new body of work inspired by my large-scale installations created for the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA). At the center of these works is the sail — not only as an object that moves a vessel across water, but as a fragile surface that absorbs history.

The fabric of the sail carries memory. It holds the breath, sweat, and silenced voices of those who were forced beneath it — the captive bodies whose labor powered the ships, whose names were erased, whose languages dissolved into the wind. The sail becomes both witness and archive. It remembers what official history has chosen to forget.

In this exhibition, the sail is not a symbol of discovery or conquest. It is a suspended skin of time — marked by absence, rupture, and endurance. Its threads echo the lives of enslaved people who propelled empires forward while being denied their own humanity.

Interwoven within this narrative is part of my own ancestral history. As Armenians, some of my ancestors were forced to convert, to take on new identities in order to survive. Their past was suppressed, their language muted, their cultural markings gradually erased. Like the sail, their identities carried hidden layers — visible only through careful attention to what remains beneath the surface.

Sailing to Nowhere speaks of displacement without arrival. Of movement without destination. Of survival that requires transformation. The works invite us to consider how memory persists even when it is denied, how fabric can become flesh, and how erased histories continue to shape the present.

The sail, stretched and exposed, becomes a space where forgotten stories return — not as monuments, but as fragile presences carried by the wind.

Kevork Mourad