Vanane Borian
Vanane Borian
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 my parents in 1998. Affected by two aspects, such as immigration and adaptation to the new Western society as an opposite of a 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. While studying for a master's degree at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art, I took a course in feminist art, after which it all made sense. Since then, I've engaged and delved into feminist discourse as an activist artist. I started creating in this direction, working with different media types, such as photography, installation, video, performance, and text. In 2018, I returned to Armenia and participated in the political revolution as an activist.
As a consequence, nowadays, most of the time, I live in Yerevan. During the process of re-immigration, I delved into the modern Armenian cultural context. I 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 collaborative research are the collaboration between art and science, emerging technologies in cultural processes, etc. At the same time, I researched and discovered metamodernism's cultural paradigm and actively spread it.
As an intersectional artist, I focus on the different types of discrimination, such as xenophobia, misogyny, or ageism, which can converge and impact individuals and groups. My subjects are diverse, but all of them focus on social criticism. The human centristic perception brought me to research the impact of social-cultural and political aspects on an individual and a group. Being an immigrant woman, I deal with the problem of the lack of identity. That point contributed to using my background and global research practices to develop an artistic language, including various creative media and tools that help me structure the messages and identify myself.
I work with irony and post-irony ideas and use them as a criticizing tool. Often I use visual advertising language that is accessible and symbolistic; it includes 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 hierarchal structures. Based on my experience living in two different religious societies, I realized the power of religion, even if that is not obvious and has not had a straight impact. That aspect has influenced my visual language, too, so I use recognizable theological symbolism. The representation of a woman's entity and the oppression of small groups in modern society have changed but still have problematic constituents. That fact is the reason for the ongoing actuality of intersectional art. Working on gender issues has allowed me to develop research practices and writing skills. While researching and analyzing metamodernist vision in my works and culture in general, I realized that in the era of transnationalism bordering the restrictions due to COVID-19, there is an absolute connectedness between biological and technological. Today, my art is about cross-disciplinary collaborations, horizontal relationships, and combining 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 connect humans to the nonbiological in the surest way by saving critical personal qualities, making human understanding, and analyzing patterns of new paradigm adoption. Rethinking and restructuring reality during global changes is the primary purpose of this connection.
