YEREVAN — Nevdon Jamgochian (born May 3, 1971, San Francisco) is an American multidisciplinary artist and writer, who has lived in Indonesia, Germany, Thailand, Senegal, China, Malaysia and India. Trained initially as a painter, his practice now spans photography, installation, text, and performance. He trained both under his family’s guidance and at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Jamgochian has exhibited internationally in Germany, Thailand, Turkey, Russia, Armenia, the United States and China. He is the recipient of the Richard Branson Mars 2025 Award from the Walden 3 Foundation. In addition to his visual projects, he writes for art publications such as Hyperallergic and Artcore Journal and his research interest includes futurism, intermediality and modernism in art history).
Nevdon, your work grapples with history and memory, often addressing themes such as genocide, animal extinction and the fragility of human legacy. As a teenager, I used to feel deep pity when looking at pictures of extinct animals. Later, I came to realize that many nations — each one a unique color in humanity’s mosaic — can also vanish, whether in the near or distant future. In your view, can art play a role in preventing such tragedies?
Art cannot prevent catastrophe in a direct, instrumental sense. Paintings, installations or performances will not stop a genocide or prevent a species from vanishing. Yet art can complicate collective memory, shape discourse and reveal the consequences of silence. When one sees an extinction or genocide in a work of art, or the fragments of an erased culture reconstructed in an installation, the encounter can generate empathy and awareness that policy papers or news cycles rarely sustain. Art lingers; it creates small cracks in certainty. While these cracks cannot prevent tragedy outright, they can create conditions where denial is harder to maintain, and forgetting is less possible. Art is also extremely cost effective. It is the least expensive why to get people to think and remember.
Art as memorial must work with the intricacies of human memory. Direct and unflinching depictions of atrocity are necessary, but they cannot stand alone if remembrance is to remain active and meaningful. What endures in collective consciousness is a layering of approaches — solemn monuments alongside satire, stark documentation alongside subtle gestures. The Holocaust demonstrates this most clearly: its memory is preserved not only through official memorials but also through cultural forms, from Mel Brooks’ humorous film The Producers to the quiet Stolpersteine project. This multiplicity of approach has made it one of the most widely recognized events of modern history. By contrast, genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, or Cambodia remain less present in popular imagination, in part because their memory has too often been confined to factual documentation, without the broader range of artistic interventions that make history emotionally resonant as well as intellectually known. Memory requires both gravity and invention to survive. My research into global memory sites — from the visitor logs at Tuol Sleng to the slave castles of Ghana — revealed a critical gap in how we engage with historical trauma. One thing we need to foreground is the universality of our experience. We cannot, as many Zionists did, say this can never happen again to us only. Genocide can never happen to anyone.
In 2014, you created 1,500,000 commemorative medals, each inscribed with “1 Armenian,” in memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide. You also initiated the Bagradian Project — a fictional autobiography of the central character from Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh — designed to confront the denial of the Armenian Genocide? How did that project unfold?
My novel (finished after 11 years as of two weeks ago, looking for publisher!) constructs a counter-historical tapestry, premised on the question of what the world would look like if the Armenian Genocide never happened. The narrative’s conceptual genesis is rooted in the implications of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code — the statute criminalizing “insulting Turkishness” through genocide recognition. The book imagines an alternate twentieth century where the Armenian intellectual and artistic milieu survived, recentering the axis of modernism within Anatolia.
