Vassilis Vlastaras is an artist based in Athens, Greece.

Vassilis Vlastaras, as an artist and researcher, is interested in public and private memory, an investigation that often leads him to the archive, using reports and journalistic sources from the media. Acting sometimes as an “activist” and others as an “ethnographer” he often highlights forms of documentation and narrative, that broadens his artistic research. Creating files and documentaries, getting ownership of publicity mechanisms, conducting interviews, statistical studies and online activity are some of the forms of structure and development of his artistic identity. Statistical surveys, public records, social criticism, surveys of economic and cultural operation, mark the beginning of many of his activities, forming his personal view-point in his practice as an active artist and tutor.

In his visual practice, Vlastaras creates large-scale site-specific installations by experimenting with various media in painting, drawing, photography, video, artist books, real time video and sound performances and computer interactive installations. By producing various artwork, he examines the relationship between artwork and urban space, the notion of the ephemeral and the interrelation between spatial movement, material and sound, often mixing different media, actions, sound poetry, writings and several elements of a heterogeneous and scalable objects. In his work, where interactivity and multimedia are vital he is continually investigating the relationships between the appetite for life and the frenzy of death, the personal and social implications of loss, oblivion, history, memory and the subsequent acts of remembrance/memorialisation.

In his visual worlds, humans endlessly are being born, evolve and die in an attempt to re-establish mankind’s position in the universe. Death for Lucretius, which he often refers to, is not good or bad just a pause of existence and the fear of death a projection of man’s everyday reality. His “heroes” are constantly looking for the meaning of Life and Truth and like in H. D. Thoreau’s “Walden; or Life in the Woods” they often set themselves a moral question in relation to what is justice and what is violent regarding human intervention. They see themselves in historic documents, famous paintings, cityscapes and deep in wooden forests creating crucial questions on existence.

Vlastaras is teaching in Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) from 1999.
As a director of studies in studio11asfa, he likes to provide an open and supportive environment for engagement with the process of art making at the highest level, attracting an activate community of students. He encourages and supports his students, to realise and strengthen their creative potential through experimentation, dialogue and fine art making in all its forms by working alongside each other in an open studio environment creating a crossover between all artistic areas.

Vassilis Vlastaras was the co-founder of ΠLATFORMES (2002-2008), a collective of art professionals ranking from visual artists to art theorists, musicians and filmmakers in Athens. Between 2006 and 2010 he was the main coordinator of Utopia Project, an annual summer residency program for artists in collaboration with experienced International artists, theorists and political scientists. Utopia Workshops were hosted by ASFA in the annex of ASFA in Rethymno, Crete, where Vlastaras performed a series of lectures and seminars about each year’s utopia’s subject. From 2013 he has been a founder and artistic director of asfaBBQ an international meeting for practitioners, theorists, students and audiences of time-based arts. From 2019 he is a co-founder of ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture an always-evolving institution for the experimentation with the limits between artistic production, the public sphere, the experience of the city and contemporary art education.