Artist Kevork Mourad will be in conversation with Helen Makhdoumian at the Spurlock Museum on Monday, April 24th. Mourad is a Syrian-born, Armenian-raised artist currently living and working in New York. His practice encompasses painting, animation, performance, and other media to explore trauma, displacement, migration, and community. Makhdoumian earned her PhD from the University of Illinois and is currently a Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, where she is completing her first book, tentatively titled A Map of This Place: Nested Memory and the Afterlives of Removal. This book “reflects her commitment to a global reach for the study of memory work — one that centers histories of dispossession and population management policies carried out for the maintenance of sovereignty.”
The two will be in conversation about Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, where I expect they will speak about memory and trauma, migration, and what it means to create work about those subjects.
This event is sponsored by the U of I’s Center for Advanced Study, European Union Center, The Center for Global Studies, The Spurlock Museum, and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies.
Kevork Mourad and Helen Makhdoumian
Spurlock Museum
600 S Gregory
Urbana
M Apr 24th, 4:30 p.m.
Free
