Oli Sorenson

Surveillance

2020

Oli Sorenson’s remix art was first recognised in London, after taking part in numerous media art events at the Institute of Contemporary Art (2003-06), Tate Britain (2006), and the British Film Institute (2008-10). He also gradually established an international profile when performing at ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2002), ISEA (Helsinki, 2004), Mapping (Geneva, 2009) and Sonica Festivals (Ljubljana, 2012). After moving to Montreal in 2010, Sorenson redirected his work towards gallery based projects, and since exhibited at The Power Plant (Toronto, 2014), FILE (Sao Paulo, 2015), Monitoring (Kassel, 2017) and Art Mûr (Berlin, 2018). Sorenson consistently disrupts institutional expectations of the visual artist as a producer of proprietary images. His work exposes the contradictions between limited copyright and massively reproducible media but also asks timely questions about singular authorship in an age of overabundant networked content. Under such conditions, the making of a contemporary work of art involves more distributed processes than isolated generative acts from original authors. Beyond market pressures to produce new and exclusive art objects, lies a material culture of exchange and emulation embraced by networked societies. Sorenson aims to unsettle this prevalence of art created from scratch by promoting gestures of citation and appropriation. When he copies, transforms and combines existing works by established artists, such cultural materials are re-used and recycled not in spite of their propertied ties to private estates but rather by virtue of their belonging to a specific heritage, community and/or collective memory.