Draft:Vardan Azatyan

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Vardan Azatyan

Vardan Azatyan (December 9, 1980, Yerevan, Armenia) is an Armenian art historian, Armenologist, translator of philosophy, and lecturer. Since the early 2000s he has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia. Since 2024 he has been the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts. He is the initiator and co‑founder of the Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities and served as its inaugural president.

Biography

Born in 1980 in the family of artists Levon Azatyan and Teni Vardanyan. From 1995 to 1997, he studied at the Panos Terlemezyan State College of Fine Arts. In 1997 he was admitted to the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia, where he graduated from the Graphics department in 2003. In the same year, he began teaching as a graduate student at the Department of Art History and Humanities. In the 2000s, he was actively involved in the contemporary art scene in Armenia. Since 2002, as the head and curator of the Fine Arts Department at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK), he has organized individual and group exibitions. In 2006, he was the head of the Art History Department at NPAK and was involved in creating the institution's archive. He was the co-founder of the Armenian branch of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), established in 2005 and served as its vice president until 2018. In 2008, he defended his master's thesis on the German historiography of 19th-century world art and medieval art of Armenia. In 2009, he co-founded the Yerevan Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2010, he became a senior lecturer at the Department of Art History and Humanities of the Academy of Fine Arts. He has also lectured at the American University of Armenia (2014), the Yerevan Institute of Contemporary Art (2009-2015), the Netherlands Institute of Art (2008), and Columbia University in New York (2008-2009).

From 2010 to 2017, he was a board member of the British journal Art and the Public Sphere, and since 2014, he has been a member of the editorial board of the journal ArtMargins. In 2014, he co-founded the Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities. Since 2021, he has been the head of the Institute's "Armenian Modernities Research Project." Since 2024, he has been the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts.

Thought and Science

Azatyan's interests include the problems of art historiography, ways of meaningfully re-examining inherited tradition, and the possibilities of understanding the processes of modernity with their contradictions. The range of his studies, conducted at the intersection of art, history, and philosophy, extends from the history of contemporary Armenian art and philosophical debates around postmodernity, from understandings of Armenian statehood and philosophical examination of modernity to the historiography of 19th-century German art and art history of the Cold War. While extensively utilizing the critical tools provided by Western science and philosophy, Azatyan simultaneously bases his historical-critical method on the Armenian intellectual tradition of the early 20th century, particularly the approaches of Ashot Hovhannisyan, Tadevos Avdalbegyan, and others.

Contemporary Art and History

In the 2000s, he was actively involved in the contemporary art scene in Armenia. Since 2002, as the head and curator of the Fine Arts Department of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (NPAK), he has organized solo exhibitions of artists Azat Sargsyan, Hovhannes Margaryan, Diana Hakobyan, Narek Avetisyan, and Karen Ohanyan, as well as several other group exhibitions. In 2006, Azatyan was the head of the Art History Department of NPAK and was involved in the creation of the institution’s archive. Based on this work, his article "Memory and/or Forgetting: Historicizing Armenian Contemporary Art" (written in 2006, published in 2008) examines the problems of historiography of contemporary art in Armenia and simultaneously historicizes and records such episodes of the early period of the history of contemporary art in Armenia that would otherwise have remained as oral, passed-down stories.

Other episodes of the historicization of contemporary art can be considered his articles “Artists’ Communities, Public Spaces, and Group Actions in Contemporary Art in Armenia” (2007), “Between Perestroika and the Neoliberal State: On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Subjectivization in Contemporary Art in Armenia” (2008), and “The Armenian Book: Episodes from the Armenian History of Myopia” (2013). This series also includes the course on the History of Modern and Contemporary Armenian Art he taught at the Yerevan Institute of Contemporary Art, which for the first time systematically presented the history of contemporary art in Armenia, without separating it from the general trajectory of Armenian art history.

The need to reexamine the value of history and make sense of it became an agenda item for the online art history journal Revisor, which Azatyan founded with his colleagues and students from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. From 2011 to 2019, Revisor was published as a separate column in the online cultural-critical journal Arteria.