About

Vahram Galstyan is an Armenian artist who works with clay, installation, video and film. Born in Yerevan in 1960, he lives and works in Los Angeles.

He trained as an engineer and came to clay almost by chance. In 1988 the ceramics studio of Yerevan’s Centre for Aesthetic Education asked him to repair a kiln no one could start. He fixed it and stayed to learn sculpture and ceramics.

From the early 1990s he was part of Armenia’s new contemporary art scene, with installations at Identification (1993) and at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, and ceramics at the Cairo International Biennale of Ceramics and the World Triennial of Small Ceramics in Zagreb. In 1995 he made his first performance, Rhinoceros, and in 1996 he began making video with clay.

He moved to Moscow in 1998, studied film directing in the workshop of Vladimir Khotinenko, and directed documentaries for the Kultura television channel, and later for Shant and Shoghakat in Armenia.

Since 2014 he has shown large installations again, among them Event in a Long Shot at the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan (2016), 383 Souls in the abandoned drama theatre of Stepanakert (2018) and his solo exhibition Between Instinct and Intelligence at the Marcel Janco Dada Museum in Ein Hod, Israel (2018). Pieces, made with Anush Ghukasyan for the Komitas Museum-Institute, received the Boghossian Prize in 2020, Armenia’s highest award for achievement in the arts.

He co-founded the UP-SE ceramic studio in Yerevan with Anush Ghukasyan, designed productions for the Sos Sargsyan National Theatre, and has taught ceramics to students and schoolchildren, most recently at the Ijevan branch of Yerevan State University.

Clay runs through almost all of his work, but he does not see it as the subject. “Clay is a material I know well,” he says. “It can imitate metal, pumice, sponge, anything. That does not mean my concept lies in clay.”

Pottery, like contemporary art, has travelled over the last half-century from sculpture and subject to object and installation. Long work with clay, and an understanding of the material and its processes, leads to taking the pottery object apart: into performance, video performance and video installation. As an old and technically conservative art, pottery keeps ancient myths and rituals at its base, and they surface again in radical practice today.

Work with clay has a reversible part and an irreversible part. Before firing, clay is reversible: any work can be returned to raw, shapeless matter, clay as clay. Firing makes its structure hard and irreversible. The idea and the energy the author puts into the work freeze; the clay seals the process of making inside itself and becomes a final result, an artifact. Yet the language of contemporary art is built on the process itself: research and trial.