Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

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Image courtesy of Oli Sorenson

Oli Sorenson
La Société de la Place des Spectacles

4 – 13 December 2014
at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

Vernissage: Saturday 6 December 2014, 14h – 17h
Performance: Saturday 6 December 2014, 16h

“[…] the very means of damaging these monitors in a performative context, to leave these marks will give exclusive properties to each of them: products of mass consumption will be transformed into unique objects …” (O. Sorenson)

Lodged under the signs of paradox, Oli Sorenson’s performance entitled La Société de la Place des Spectacles is presented on December 6th at 4 pm in Montreal’s Belgo Building. This performance taps right at the heart of spectacular fervor, while investing in the denial his own representation by continuing his series of “revisited works.” This corpus, triggered by a will to comment on the existing work of other creators as much as mass-produced objects, is here explored under the logic of destruction. Strangely, Sorenson’s exercise in transfiguration aspires to restore a stamp of uniqueness onto already original creations.For the occasion of this performance, a brand new large-format video monitor is assailed within a filmed performance. Sorenson then demolishes a second monitor, as it plays back the initially filmed performance. And so on, so the recording of the second performance is also shown on the first broken screen and produce the proverbial Mise-en-Abyme. “These monitors will simultaneously become artifacts and archival tools of my performances.” (OS). This staged event, inspired from the live works of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) of meticulously ransacking large mirrors, revisits under new materials the classical traditions of vanitas together with one of the more celebrated exploits of Arte Povera.

Does Sorenson invite us from this point on to reassess art’s materiality if its generative principles now spawn from the destruction of its components? Is it inevitably doomed for erasure? Could the threat of disappearance, so far hostile to art market logic and fetishism, also be co-opted if this disappearance is already planned for the digital cities to come? It is precisely in not answering these questions that Sorenson’s La Société de la Place des Spectacles confront us with a paradoxical twist, an absurd action forged in the same relentless flight of obsolescence and waste as our current media feeding frenzy.

Oli Sorenson was born in Los Angeles, holds a Masters in interactive media from UQÀM and is currently Doctoral candidate at Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Programme. He has lived and worked in London (UK) between 1999 and 2010, here he performed at several institutions including Tate Britain and Institute of Contemporary Art as well as curated a series of events at the British Film Institute. He also has exhibited internationally including Millennium Museum (Beijing), Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Dokfest (Kassel), ISEA (Helsinki and Nagoya) and MAF (Bangkok) and more. His solo exhibition Antimap was presented at Optica (Montréal) in 2012. He lives and works in Montréal. olisorenson.com

POPOP Gallery
Espace 442
372 Sainte-Catherine Ouest
Montréal, QC
H3B 1A2

Opening hours
Wednesday – Saturday: 12h30 – 17h00

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Image courtesy of Oli Sorenson

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