The Image of Power: A Bergen Parade – a lecture

In this lecture the artist Erick Beltrán will present and talk about various images that have been used as ways of representing power throughout history, and the philosophical and ideological implications of these images. After the lecture everyone is invited to join a conversation taking its point of departure in a questionnaire on some issues of power.

Many abstract ideas are subjectively accessible only if they are embodied in something we can relate to immediately. The idea of Justice, for instance, is collectively conceived in the likeness of a balance (scales), while we imagine Liberty constituted as a human body in the guise of a woman in white robes. How, as a collective, do we represent power/the state today? How, as individuals, do we imagine power (visually or otherwise), and how do such imaginaries come into being? This endless tension between the individual and the collective can be translated into the relation between subject and state.

The evening at Hordaland kunstsenter is the beginning of an art project that Volt is organizing with Erick Beltrán, which will culminate in a parade in public space in Bergen in the autumn of 2019. In the months following this evening, a small team will ask people in Bergen about their ideas of power and possible ways of representing it visually. On the basis of the collected material, Beltrán will create placards, masks, and a script that will all be presented in the parade.

Erick Beltrán works with various formats such as installations, sculpture, printouts, newspapers, publications, drawings, photography and lecture-performances. He often works with texts and images, and he is interested in how images are defined, valued, ordered, classified, selected, reproduced and distributed. He is fascinated by how information circulates and is organized, since it conditions the way we understand the world. More broadly, at the heart of his approach are language and our relationship with knowledge: his diagrams, plans and graphical systems are attempts to explain the world.

Some recent exhibitions include the Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador 2018), Laocoon’s Dream (La Tallera, Mexico, 2018); Game Piece (Espacio Odeón Bogotá 2018; Volt, Bergen 2013); The Fallen Tree (Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, 2015); Atlas Eidolon (Museo Rufino Tamayo, México DF, 2014). Previous exhibitions include Yinchuan Biennale, the Vac Foundation Venice, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila, Bienal de São Paulo, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, TBA21 Contemporary, Vienna, Taipei Biennial, Lyon Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. He is currently doing a PhD at the University of the Arts Helsinki. He lives and works in Barcelona.