Galerie Claude Lemand

WORK of the WEEK - MAY MURAD - Time cannot be paused.
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Pauline de Laboulaye : May Murad. Virtual Reality.

The work of May Murad tries to rec­on­cile both phys­ical and vir­tual pres­ence. Her self-por­traits do not pass by means of a mirror, but rather through a screen­shot. Not a thoughtful face-to-face posi­tion with her own reflected image, but an intense desire of expres­sion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion via the only channel avail­able for the artist; her com­puter. Born in Gaza, in the world’s biggest jail. May Murad had been sub­jected to double impris­on­ment, geo­graph­ical and cul­tural, under the iron role of reli­gious and patri­ar­chal regime who con­tin­u­ally restrains women and lock them up. Like a bird, looking at the world from behind the bars of its cage, she is opening elec­tronic aper­tures. Their semantic and visual codes have become the familiar and inti­mate set­ting of her pur­suit of soul­mates and the dis­covery of a whole world beyond walls. Behind the closed cur­tains of her room in Gaza, she suc­ceeded to free her­self from clothing yokes and per­sonify the young woman she had always aspired to be, for her own sake and for others. She was able to carry out an exchange of emails con­taining vir­tual land­scapes and plants with a Scottish artist, Rachel Ashton, who sent sights of leafy and grassy forests and ini­ti­ated May into botan­ical draw­ings.

When by mir­acle May Murad could obtain an exit permit, cou­pled with a ban on re-entry for the dura­tion of one year, she took the dif­fi­cult deci­sion of exile and thus, dis­em­barked in the out­side world she deeply dreamt of. Yet, the reality con­tinued to slip out of her hands. Upon arrival in France, she real­ized that her country does not exist, her nation­ality is inde­ter­mined. Another lan­guage, another cul­ture and another longing sent her back hanging onto her screen, to weep with family but without con­soling hugs and com­forting scents. The lone­li­ness of exile and then of con­fine­ment treaded on the heels of the one she expe­ri­enced in her home prison.

Fortunately enough, there is painting, brush strokes, jolly or angry, delighted or enraged, the gentle touch, unhur­ried or accel­er­ated, the vivid vibra­tion of colours, the model’s ten­der­ness, the mis­leading inac­cu­rate depth of shades and shadows, the gleams and sparkles of light. While in Gaza, the artist barley emerged from grey shadowy hue who yielded only to a few harsh hints, her more recent work is shrouded in warm, blue-shaded envi­ron­ment, the inti­mate space cre­ated by the lumi­nous screen. Although painting com­forts after the resent­ment of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, it remains com­mitted to it, it does not alter its vir­tual per­cep­tion, but rather mag­ni­fies it by giving it the vital spark, the force who per­sists in its inten­tion to com­mu­ni­cate.

Lying down among delightful and homely cush­ions, taken by reading, lost in her inner world, or even while slum­bering, the painter-model is addressing, on an inward-looking approach, the one who looks, opening her inti­macy to the observer’s. At that point, open­ings, one after another, start to emerge, translu­cent or veiled, warding off every illu­sion of obscu­rity or world­li­ness. A scheme of bits, fig­ures, pic­tograms and num­bers, drop-down menus with series of blinding lim­ited options, watch­words or error mes­sages, and encrypted instruc­tions in the form of exis­ten­tial pre­cepts, all these com­po­nents are building together the frame whereby passes the inti­mate com­mu­ni­ca­tion. May Murad is col­lecting those sig­nif­i­cant and illu­sive ele­ments, taking them in, only to be able to come up with a har­mo­nious intel­li­gible mes­sage; from them, she draws out lex­ical poetic visions where signs become legends, where words meet phys­ical and emo­tional reality to be more revealing and ‘to feel less alone’.

The art of May Murad has gained a new rel­e­vance during this pan­demic period mainly dom­i­nated by vir­tual date-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In ques­tioning the very notion of pres­ence, phys­ical and vir­tual, her work is sum­moning the pos­si­bility of dis­ap­pear­ance, the vir­tual per­spec­tive as an ante­room, a fore­runner of dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion, of dis­fig­ure­ment leading to dis­so­lu­tion. Hence was the case of Jamil, the Palestinian pris­oner dis­fig­ured by tor­ture to the point that even his wife was not able to recog­nise him during the trial in front of the Court of Jerusalem. Jamil, trying to draw his wife’s atten­tion, started to cry out “I am Jamil, ya Rawan I exist, I exist”.