Sebastián Betancur-Montoya
At a time when the age-old mechanisms that restrict freedom, agency, and expression are becoming increasingly visible—and at times disturbingly forceful—could invisibility itself become a meaningful response? In this context, perhaps holding space, playfulness, or ambiguous provocation become subtle tools for subterfuge.
Public art, as a practice, feels at a crossroads...
...Though historically, it has always been situated in tension with systems of power. From monumental Pharaonic landmarks to contemporary memorials celebrating democracy, more often than not, public artworks have colluded with power and served as material expressions of the prevailing order of their time, with only seldom gestures toward resistance or emancipation.
In the 1960s, for instance, minimalism pushed art beyond the walls of galleries and markets, seeking to return it to the spaces of the everyday. For a moment, this shift was felt as radical [at least from a Western perspective, for what it’s worth]. Fast-forward a few decades, and the art market hijacked and redirected that spirit, flipping it into a profitable cog of the very systems it once sought to disrupt—oftentimes with the complacency of artists who once positioned themselves in opposition.
Might we then ask how intentionally artists submit to the compromising demands of power? Or, rather, is public art funding itself an instrument of control?
Perhaps it is high time to reconsider how public art is awarded, commissioned, funded, sited, and criticized. The model of commissions as career rewards, markers of consistency, or opportunities to leave behind a legacy —often tethered to capitulation to a status quo of institutional agendas, market pressures, and political interests— risks undermining public discourse rather than expanding it.
In recent times, graffiti, defacings, and the toppling of public sculptures have manifested as prominent acts of dissent. Far from simple destruction, these actions signal an urge to re-signify works that no longer speak to their contexts. They reveal a disconnect between what is commissioned and the publics for whom it is ostensibly intended.
What if not only established —tamed and restrained— artists, but also young voices, “minorities” from the global majority, late bloomers, and nonconformists were granted the same freedom in public art as they enjoy in galleries and museums? Under current systems, affording such agency remains elusive...
One radical possibility might be to rethink —or even abandon— traditional acquisition models. uncommisioned proposes an artist-centered approach, built on decentralized networks of trust rather than hierarchy, encouraging creators to directly engage with their realities without the constraints of gatekeeping institutions. By stripping public art down to its essentials —an artist and their intention in conversation with a site and a moment— it becomes possible to imagine a form of practice that is both tender and subversive, one that allows new manifestations of public art to emerge.
About the Curator
With a landscape architect’s sensibility, the urbanist macro perspective, a maker’s eye for details and an educator’s sense of social responsibility; Sebastián develops public art masterplans and interventions as a curator, visual artist, and fabricator interchangeably. He holds a certification in Sculpture fabrication, a BA in Architecture/Urbanism, and an MA in Museums and Gallery Practice. Working in disparate contexts such as Latin America, the Caribbean, and the WANA region for 20 years has situated his interests at the intersection of mobility, global politics, and local ecologies.
Understanding the publicness of a work of art beyond its scale and materials and uncommitted to a medium, Sebastián’s curatorial work has engaged with public sculpture and installations traversing through performance, land-art, text, and light-based works; often intertwining curatorial practice and social/environmental activism.
His work, although mostly associated with urban sculpture, has also taken shape as exhibitions, publications, residencies, workshops, art fairs, and informal initiatives in Colombia, Nassau, Doha, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Shanghai, and across the GCC.
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"I am interested in blurring the boundaries of Public Art not only as a practice but as a structure. Funding, decision-makers, bureaucracy, and market trends have become ballasts, often anchoring the format to an over-technified enlargement exercise and voiding it from artistic experimentation.
By challenging the practices and hierarchies of the stagnant commissioning models, and instead, operating from an artist-centric ethos and through decentered networks of trust, I’ve found in uncommissioned a subversive yet tender model to imagine and make different manifestations of public art possible."