Vardan Azatyan is an art historian and translator specialized in the history of contemporary art and art historiography. He is an associate professor in art history at Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts, Armenia. He was a visiting professor at Columbia University and a guest teacher at Dutch Art Institute. His recent publications include articles in Oxford Art Journal, Human Affairs, Springerin, The Internationaler. He is a member of International Association of Art Critics and a co-editor, with Malcolm Miles, of the volume Cultural Memory (University of Plymouth Press, 2010). He is the translator of major works by George Berkeley and David Hume into Armenian.

 

Disintegrating Progress: On the Emergence of Contemporary Art Practices in Armenia

 

In his lecture art historian Vardan Azatyan discussed the conditions and dynamics of the emergence of contemporary art practices in Armenia in 1970s. He considered contemporary art practices in Armenia as a last spark in the long history of the disintegration of the Bolshevik cultural policies introduced by the Sovietization of Armenia in 1920. He argued that precisely because of being the final point of the breakdown of those policies, contemporary art practices in Armenia are in structural opposition to, and therefore haunted by the cultural policies of Bolshevism.