Grigor was born in 1952 in Yerevan, Armenia. Lives and works in Yerevan.
For six years (1994-2000) Grigor Khachatrian collaborated with another Armenian artist, Norair Ayvazyan, on a
project now presented in Çanakkale. Armenian Dreams conceives of a bathtub positioned on a heightened table,
crowned by a video-projected imagery of the waterscape in front. In Armenian cultural context the table refers to
the sanctification of the nation, the family, and the idea of community in general. Additionally, Khachatrian plays
with the word bathtub (“vanna” in Russian) while associating it with the name of the lake Vana (Turkish: Van
Gölü, Armenian: Vana lich; Kurdish: Gola Wanê). This wordplay brings forward the phantom pain of Armenians - in
relation to the piece of their fatherland, lost about one century ago - which has become increasingly trivialized
in popular power discourses. Accordingly, Khachatrian and Ayvazyan address this situation absurdly enough: by
placing the bathtub on the table, a composition of two elements becomes an ironic answer to such discourses and
their instrumentalization of the ‘lake-issue’ for merely political purposes.
