Opening reception: Saturday, November 8, 2025 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Oli Sorenson: Vidéo Pistoletto
Text by Marsha Taichman
Oli Sorenson’s practice is cerebral and concept-based while being visually appealing and speaking to present-day world issues. He has two exhibitions at Art Mur that can be seen as discrete works, but are put in dialogue in this exhibition. He is able to work in many mediums to convey how insidious and sinister commodity culture is, and what will be left behind long after we as individuals, or possibly a species, is gone.
Video Pistoletto (2014-2018) examines the Arte Povera movement through a contemporary lens. The founder of the movement, Michelangelo Pistoletto, did performances that involved breaking mirrors, while Sorenson shattered LCD screens with a hammer and chisel, the pieces spraying while still displaying some video signals. Like Arte Povera, the media is rendered impotent, or cannot be used as it was in its original version. It has been impoverished. Yet these damaged goods become new, tangible (if dysfunctional) objects.
La Métacrise was created as a prelude to the Metamonument project, which is a constellation of physical and virtual works presented from January 2026. Building on previous exhibitions such as Anthropocene and Capitalocene, La Métacrise demonstrates how ecological incidents are intimately linked to international economic and political crises. The viewer is reminded of global warming, class inequalities, overconsumption, persistent colonialism, globalization, and recurring wars, all of which usurp natural resources and are symptomatic of late capitalism.
Parc Industriel shows a concert of smokestacks silhouetted on a bright yellow background. The tone is somber, save for the pops of sparkles. It’s a wasteland, aestheticized.
Continent de plastique depicts a hyper-coloured iceberg with pieces splintering into the water, much like the Depotior, where we are faced with a mountain of glittering, geometric debris being dumped by a tiny green truck, giving a scale of the amount of waste generated. Can it be processed into something new, something beautiful, or is it a site of bright landfill? A yellow bulldozer, also dwarfed by the coloured clutter, seems to make no headway with what has been left behind. We are left with a graphically appealing futility, trash buried into strata of black and purple earth. No solutions are presented, but the problems are certainly exposed.
