Victor Guzman
Neural Echoes: My Chile

For the exhibition Neural Echoes: My Chile, Victor Guzman has mainly worked on drawings, videos, and 3D-printed sculptures that he designed himself in a modelling program.
In the works presented at this exhibition, the artist explores ideas related to identity, memory, and personal history, with Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memory serving as one of the artist’s main inspirations. Among other topics, Landsberg’s book examines how historical narratives and memories of the past are shaped by information stemming from mass culture and media. How does such information influence our collective memory? This is also a key question in Guzman’s project, where he connects his own family’s story of immigration to how Chilean mass media has affected his family while they lived in Norway.
As Guzman himself explains: “I’ve always believed that the memories I have from Chilean and Norwegian TV were my own – that they were mine. But as shown by Landsberg’s theories of ‘prosthetic memory’, it turns out they were only lent to me, as a collective memory. I never experienced the dictatorship in Chile myself, as my parents did, but since it is part of my family history, it lingers in me – as the trace of images, or as a prosthetic implant – through information that comes from the mass media and my parents.”
The core of Guzman’s project is about how we can take ownership of these “borrowed” memories.

Victor Guzman (b. 1987 in Valparaiso, Chile) lives and works in Oslo. He has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in art from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Guzman has previously had works displayed at the National Museum, Bergen Kunsthall, the Autumn Exhibition, the Western Norway Exhibition, the Drawing Triennial, and Buskerud Kunstsenter, and he has held solo exhibitions at several museums and galleries in Norway, including Randsfjordmuseet, Visningsrommet USF, and Sagene Kunstsmie. Guzman works within various media, such as sculpture, drawing, and video. Thematically, his art often focuses on family history, popular culture, and mass media, exploring how these spheres affect our collective and individual memories.