Sebastián Betancur-Montoya
Quoting Arlene Raven “Public Art isn’t a hero on a horse anymore.”
Sebastián’s research points at a crisis in the traditional formal and material values of public art [solidity, verticality, immutability, preciousness, etc.] and its historical entanglement with power; he instead, puts forward fragility, horizontality, instability, and softness as urgent qualities to be embraced by interventions in the public space. In tune with the anxieties of this moment and time, art that cast doubts rather than offering certainty has the potential to connect with diverse communities and just maybe not take itself all that serious.
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.
"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."