Jon Rafman is one of the most significant artists exploring the digital age. His videos, films and immersive installations examine how digital culture is reshaping desire, identity and experience.
Rafman’s artistic practice combines masterfully told stories with digitally generated visual worlds in which opposites such as sincerity and irony, beauty and the grotesque, connection and alienation coexist. In doing so, he draws on internet subcultures, virtual worlds and AI-generated images. Rafman creates artificial realities that are both alluring and unsettling.
“Main Stream Media” at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a German museum. Through immersive, room-filling installations, it provides an overview of Rafman’s work since 2008. Alongside his early works, later pieces such as the feature-length video *Dream Journal*, which was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, are also on display. Rafman’s latest work, Main Stream Media Network (2025), evokes the culturally influential MTV of the 1980s through AI-generated music videos. (Source: K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen)
Exhibition dates: 30 May to 27 September 2026.
