In Réalité virtuelle (Virtual Reality), May Murad presents a series of paintings highlighting different aspects of daily life, and more specifically that lived during the periods of lockdown.
In an imposed virtual world, May Murad seeks in each of the women she depicts – whether portraits or self-portraits – the ability to see and express the deepest feelings, fears and images of the subconscious.
Faced with the difficulty of this episode of life, she thus generates an art that protects from too much solitude, through a story that would be told through the interaction of the viewer with the paintings.
Representing both the emptiness and the relief of ordinary life, lived and unlived at the same time, Virtual Reality is a window – here symbolically digital – which continues to be built.
The window connects me to the world at the same time it isolates me even more. I am connected to the world but I remain distant from it because the window is at the same time the hope, the opening but it can be also the closing and the enclosure which I know perfectly in Gaza. This project bears the imprint of my exile. It is a consecration and a personal and inner accomplishment that, in a way, launches me into the great bath of the artistic world that I have been dreaming of for a long time. A world rich in possibilities but also full of disillusionment.
– May Murad
May Murad (Palestine) was previously in residency at the Cité internationale des arts in partnership with the Welfare Association program and with the support of the City of Paris (2018 – 2019).