Vartan avakian biography books
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His work emphasizes the limitations of digitization, advocating for practices of encountering, witnessing, and cross-contamination that foreground the affective, communal, material, sensory, and political dimensions of memory. Although these figurines are in some way modelled on traditional monuments, they refuse to fulfil their representative function and instead become symbols of the protagonists’ failure.
He engages archives, geology, and vernacular culture to explore how survival, loss, and continuity are inscribed in images, objects, and terrain.
In his work A Very Short History of Tall Men, he portrays leaders of failed coups d’état as little golden figurines. 1977, Byblos, Lebanon, is an artist based in Beirut.
Vartan Avakian
Vartan Avakian, b.
He is a founding member of the art collective Atfal Ahdath and a member of the Arab Image Foundation.
His latest exhibitions include Light in Wartime at Apexart, New York (2018), Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbors at MAXXI, Rome (2018), Chapter V at Savvy Contemporary, Betlin (2018) and Esma’/Listen at the Beirut Art Center (2017).
His work has been shown in Center for Contemporary Arts Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2015; Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2015; VideoWorks, Beirut, 2015; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2012; Transmediale 2K+12, Berlin, 2012; Sharjah Biennial X, Sharjah, 2011; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, 2011; The Cube, Taipei, 2011; South London Gallery, London, 2011; Home Works V, Beirut, 2010; Beirut Art Center, Beirut, 2010.
Through processes that privilege slowness, obsolescence, and decay, Avakian resists the flattening of history into mere data, proposing instead alternative modes of remembrance grounded in materiality, affect, and lived experience. He often works with natural materials which he transforms, preserving the history of these materials while turning them into novel objects.
He works with video, photography, installation and natural material. His unorthodox academic trajectory, which encompasses engineering, cinema studies, and urbanism, continues to shape the experimental and multidisciplinary nature of his practice. This kind of ambivalence is characteristic of Avakian’s entire oeuvre, making us acutely aware of the significance of history, culture and memory.
- Exhibition
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
25.05.-17.06.2018 - From the series “Künstlerhaus Bethanien”
- A close look at up-and-coming young artists
Biography
Vartan Avakian is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video, photography, sculpture, and installation.
Avakian is the recipient of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2012.
Verlag Kettler
The works of Vartan Avakian (born in Byblos, Lebanon, in 1977) cut across different genres, ranging from video clips, installations and sculptures to photography and other media. In his work, objects are treated as portals between past and future, and as fossils for future archaeological investigation.
Growing up in Byblos—a city layered with archaeological strata, fossils, and scattered artifacts—Avakian developed an early sensitivity to memory, materiality, and erasure.
Born in Byblos, Lebanon, and currently based between Beirut and Berlin, his work investigates how time inscribes itself onto objects, revealing the infrastructures through which memory is stored, sensed, and transmitted. Avakian studied Architecture and Urban Culture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and Communication Arts at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
For his series entitled Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust, for instance, Avakian used dust particles collected at historical landmarks to create glittering crystals. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in institutions and biennials across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, reflecting a sustained engagement with how history persists, mutates, and is experienced across time and space.
His projects often blend research, fieldwork, and creative experimentation, exploring how ephemeral traces—dust, data, ruins, and photographic materials—carry the weight of both collective and personal memory.
Avakian serves on the board of the Arab Image Foundation, an organization devoted to preserving and studying photographic archives across the Middle East and North Africa.
During his tenure, the foundation focused on endangered archives from Armenian, Palestinian, Kurdish, and LGBTQ communities.
Merging rigorous historical research with experimental storytelling, Avakian’s projects propose methods for reclaiming and reimagining contested histories.