Biography

Vartan Avakian is an artist working with video, photography, and sculpture. He is a board member of the Arab Image Foundation and is represented by Marfa’ Projects, Beirut.

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Vartan Avakian is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video, photography, sculpture, and installation. 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. 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. His unorthodox academic trajectory, which encompasses engineering, cinema studies, and urbanism, continues to shape the experimental and multidisciplinary nature of his practice. He engages archives, geology, and vernacular culture to explore how survival, loss, and continuity are inscribed in images, objects, and terrain. 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. 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. In this capacity, he addresses issues of archival ethics, historical erasure, and the politics of memory, particularly concerning marginalized and displaced communities. 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. 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. 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.