Silk Road Ensemble Artists

Kevork Mourad
visual artist (Armenia)

Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian origin, was born in 1970 in Kamechli, Syria. After his education in Syria, he was accepted to the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia, where he received his MFA in 1996. His first experiment in the technique of live visuals that became his defining medium started with the Gyumri biennial, in which he performed with trombonist David Minassian. His technique of spontaneous painting, in which he shares the stage with musicians, is a collaboration in which art and music develop in counterpoint to each other. Since then his collaborations have included a live performance with Djivan Gasparyan, (renowned Armenian duduk player) at Cooper Union in April 2001, and a benefit show including painting exhibit and performance, for the Coalition to Ban Land Mines at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, in tandem with George Winston (pianist). He performed with Kinan Azmeh, (clarinetist and composer) at Juilliard’s “Beyond the Machine” Festival produced by Mari Kimura, in a project based on the epic of Gilgamesh. The same piece was also performed at the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York, the City University of New York, and recently closer to Gilgamesh's home in Uruk (modern-day Iraq), against the three-thousand-year-old wall of the old city of Damascus, Syria. In 2004 he performed with the Latin Jazz Band SYOTOS at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and he currently collaborates with Ken Ueno of the Minimum Security Composers Collective. In 2006, he performed in Morelia, Mexico, and in 2007 in Mexico City at the IX Festival Internacional Música y Escena with the percussion quartet, Tambuco. Collaborations with New York classical musicians Colin Jacobsen, Johnny Gandelsman, Eric Jacobsen, Nick Cords, and others, have been seen at the Tenri Center, Angel Orensantz, the Brooklyn Lyceum, and the 92nd St. Y’s Makor Classical Café. In the spring of 2005, he joined Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, with which he has performed at Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, the Nara Museum in Nara, Japan, the Rubin Museum in New York, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent Works:

2004 - 2005 The Gilgamesh Project with Kinan Azmeh
2006 Frangiz Alizadeh’s Mugham Sayagi with the Silk Road Ensemble
2006 Sounds of the Brush with Ken Ueno and Hans Tutschku
2006 Soundimage with Liubo Borissov
2007 Songs of Komitas with the Brooklyn Rider
2007 Soundscape with Tambuco
2008 Cirène with Colin and Eric Jacobsen and Maile Okamura