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Kevork Mourad: The Echoes of Silent Bells

May 12 – July 5, 2026

Press Release

Dubai, UAE – Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to present The Echoes of Silent Bells, a solo exhibition by Kevork Mourad. Opening in Dubai in May 2026, the exhibition brings together a new body of paintings, sculptural works, installations, and hand-cut compositions that reflect Kevork Mourad’s ongoing exploration of memory, displacement, cultural preservation, and the emotional architecture of history. Through layered visual narratives and intricate material processes, The Echoes of Silent Bells traces the fragile intersections between personal remembrance and collective cultural identity.

Born in Qameshli, Syria, and shaped by the cultural richness of Aleppo as well as his Armenian heritage, Kevork Mourad’s practice emerges from a deep engagement with histories that have been fractured, erased, or transformed by time and conflict. Working across painting, animation, performance, and installation, Mourad constructs visual worlds where architecture, figures, and landscapes dissolve into rhythmic lines and layered surfaces. His works function as both testimony and meditation—spaces where memory is preserved not as static documentation, but as living emotional experience.

In The Echoes of Silent Bells, Mourad reflects on the endurance of culture through fragmentation and reconstruction. Across monumental installations such as Memories of the Stones and Tower, alongside intimate works including The Last Prayer, Echoes in Stone, and The Silent Bells, the artist explores themes of absence, resilience, spirituality, and transformation. Architectural forms appear suspended between ruin and renewal, while human figures emerge and disappear within densely layered compositions that evoke the passage of time and the persistence of memory.

Central to Mourad’s practice is his unique visual language of line. Inspired by the musical traditions and oral histories of the Middle East and Armenia, his compositions unfold rhythmically across surfaces, often resembling musical notation or calligraphic movement. Through hand-cut canvases, layered textiles, recycled denim, and sculptural forms, Mourad expands painting into physical space, allowing shadows, voids, and negative space to become active elements within the work. These spatial interruptions suggest both loss and continuity—what remains visible and what lingers beyond sight.

The exhibition also highlights Mourad’s longstanding interest in storytelling as a communal and sensory act. Rather than presenting history through fixed narratives, his works invite viewers into immersive emotional landscapes shaped by memory, mythology, and imagination. Pieces such as Kalila wa Dimnah, The Conference of the Birds, and When Time Was Like a River reference literary, spiritual, and folkloric traditions while simultaneously addressing contemporary experiences of migration, exile, and cultural survival.

Throughout The Echoes of Silent Bells, Mourad considers art as a vessel for preserving endangered histories and intangible cultural memory. His layered compositions resist linear readings; instead, they propose memory as fragmented, fluid, and constantly reconstructed through personal and collective experience. In doing so, the exhibition reflects on the role of art in carrying histories forward—transforming silence, loss, and displacement into spaces of reflection and connection.

Immersive, poetic, and deeply resonant, The Echoes of Silent Bells continues Kevork Mourad’s broader artistic practice of bridging visual art, music, performance, and narrative. Here, memory becomes both material and gesture—an evolving language through which forgotten places, voices, and histories are reimagined for the present.

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