Collage

In his collages, Aram employs pages from art historical publications as both material and subject, incorporating reproductions of Islamic ceramics, architectural details, and ornamental objects into painted compositions. These works literalize his archaeological approach, excavating images from scholarly texts and recontextualizing them within contemporary artistic frameworks. Each collage becomes a meditation on how cultural objects circulate through academic discourse, transformed from lived artifacts into art historical specimens through the act of photography and publication. The artist treats these appropriated images not as illustrations, but as active participants in ongoing cultural conversations.

The collage works reveal Aram's deep engagement with the mechanisms of art historical knowledge production, questioning how ornamental traditions have been presented, categorized, and understood within Western scholarship. By embedding these reproductions within fields of paint, he creates temporal layerings that collapse historical distance, suggesting ongoing relationships between past and present practice. The collages often feature the same ceramic objects repeated across multiple works, but surrounded by different painted interventions, exploring how context and framing affect interpretation while highlighting the reproducibility of the photographic image versus the uniqueness of painted gesture.