Event as part of the Art:walk Festival
With Main Stream Media, K21 is showing the first solo exhibition by Canadian artist Jon Rafman in a German museum. Immersive installations, videos and AI imagery explore desire, identity and experience in the digital age.
The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Jon Rafman's work since 2008 and shows works that deal intensively with the cultural influences of the digital age. Rafman's videos, films and space-filling installations combine virtuoso storytelling with digitally generated visual worlds. Internet subcultures, virtual spaces and AI-generated images serve as a starting point for him to visualise tensions between sincerity and irony, beauty and the grotesque as well as closeness and alienation. His artificial realities are both seductive and unsettling and reflect how digital media shapes desire, identity and perception. The exhibition includes the feature-length video Dream Journal 2016-2019 (2019), which was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale. The overview is complemented by Rafman's most recent work Main Stream Media Network (2025), in which AI-generated music videos evoke the aesthetically defining MTV of the 1980s. (Source: Art:walk Festival)
