WELCOME TO THE ARTIST SPACE
VANANE BORIAN
multidisciplinary contemporary artist
I am an Israeli and Armenian artist, living and working in both countries. I was born in 1984 in Armenia and immigrated to Israel with her parents in 1998. Affected by two aspects, such as immigration and adaptation in the new Western society as an opposite for USSR born person, and the heritage of the country of origin, which includes the Armenian cultural traditions and Russian-Soviet influence, I've formed a multi-contextual perception of reality. During my studies of Master's degree at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, I've taken a course in feminist art, after which everything finally fell into place. Since then I've engaged and delved into feminist discourse as an activist artist and started creation in this direction working with different types of media, such as photography, installation, video, performance, and texts. In 2018, I returned to Armenia and took part as an activist in the political revolution. As a result, nowadays, most of the time I live in Yerevan. During the process of return immigration, I delved into the modern Armenian cultural context and became a co-creator of an art collective (Y collective) and an audio-visual educational platform (Plug-in), jointly with the artist Anna Vahrami. The main issues of the collective research are the collaboration between art and science, the use of emerging technologies in the cultural processes, etc. At the same time, I research and discover metamodernism's cultural paradigm and actively spread it.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an intersectional artist, I focus on the way that different types of discrimination—such as xenophobia, misogyny, or ageism—can converge and impact individuals and groups, and their work explores these complex interactions. My subjects are diverse, but all of them focused on social critics. The human centristic perception brought me to the idea of researching the impact of social-cultural, political aspects on a unit and on a group with common contexts. Being an immigrant woman put me in an identity lack spot and that point contributed to using personal background and global research practices to develop an artistic language which includes a range of creative media and tools that help me to structurize the messages and identify myself. I work with irony and post-irony ideas and use them as a criticizing tool. Often I use the advertising visual language that is accessible and symbolistic, it includes a satire and a very straight message. That makes the irony stronger. I'm dealing with commodity fetishism and sexualization, body issues, the hypocrisy of equality, the patriarchal gaze, and the hierarchal structures. Based on my experience of living in two different religious societies, I realized the power of religion, even if that is not obvious and has not a straight impact. That aspect has influenced my visual language too, so I experienced using recognizable theological symbolism. The representation of a woman's entity and the level of small group oppression in modern society changes, but still have problematic constituents, this is the reason for the ongoing actuality of intersectional art. Working on gender issues brought me to developing research practices and writing. During the research and analyzing metamodernist vision in my own works and culture in general, I realized that In the era of transnationalism bordering the restrictions due to the COVID-19 there is an absolute connectedness between biological and technological. I've delved into inter-human behaviors issues and technological and scientific aspects of our reality. Today my art is about interdisciplinary collaborations, horizontal relationships, the combination of science and art. I believe, that science and art in cooperation will become a contemporary translation tool. It will translate from the technological to the humanitarian, and will connect the human to the nonbiological in the surest way. By saving important personal qualities and making human understanding and analyzing ways of new paradigm adoption. Rethinking and restructuring the reality during global changes is the main purpose of this connection.