Jon Rafman: Main Stream Media

K21 will present the first solo exhibition in a German museum by internationally renowned artist Jon Rafman (b. 1981) from May 30 to September 27, 2026. The exhibition offers an overview of his work since 2008 and introduces Rafman as a pioneering artist of the digital age. With a sharp eye and dark humor, Rafman’s artistic practice explores how we, as a society, engage with the internet and its constant transformations. A first monographic publication will be released to accompany the exhibition.

For Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Jon Rafman is one of the most significant artists of the digital age: “He creates works that use AI as a medium, among other things, and critically examine the ways in which AI affects people and society. With the Canadian artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, we are bringing central questions of the digital age into the museum: How are the Internet and digital technologies changing our society?”

Jon Rafman was born in Montreal in 1981 and lives in Los Angeles. After studying philosophy, literature, and film, he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. Rafman’s artistic practice combines masterfully narrated stories with fantastical, grotesque imagery and immersive spatial installations. Both enthusiastic and critical, he employs computer-generated visual languages and adopts the latest digital technologies. A media-archaeological interest is evident in his engagement with the fate of virtual platforms such as “Second Life” and his ongoing project “Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” initiated in 2008.

The art of the digital natives
Since the early days of Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s, the artistic generation of so-called digital natives has explored the internet as a field of artistic practice while critically observing how rapidly evolving digital technologies shape society. Rafman adopts a media-archaeological perspective as he revisits the individualized, user-generated chatrooms and message boards from the early internet era. Once highly frequented, these have largely been abandoned in favor of centralized apps such as Snapchat and Instagram and now appear as desolate digital ruins. Rafman’s work holds a mirror up to this emptiness. Rather than asking how far technology has progressed since the 2000s, he asks how profoundly we as a society have changed.

The exhibition Main Stream Media at K21 presents an overview of Rafman’s work in six chapters. Works from the past 18 years demonstrate how new technological tools—from specialized software and elements of video gaming to the use of AI—have shaped not only modes of production but also aesthetics, visual logics, and narrative forms. On view are early works such as “Kool-Aid Man in Second Life” (2008-2011), the three videos of the “Betamale Trilogy” (2013-2015), the four-part series of essay films created using video game engines (2013-2018), as well as—presented in a large cinema with humanoid lounge chairs—the feature-length videos “Dream Journal 2016–2019” (2019) and “Minor Daemon: Vol. I” (2021). The most recent work in the exhibition is the eponymous project “Main Stream Media Network” (2025-2026). Using music videos made with AI tools, it takes MTV, a defining cultural force of the 1980s and 1990s, as the last symbol of a shared cultural reality, and asks what 'mainstream' means after that reality has collapsed. 

The immersive spatial design of the exhibition was developed in collaboration with the architecture studio Juvenilia. With printed wallpapers, curtains, tarps, carpets, built structures, props, and colored lighting, Rafman’s exhibition offers a varied experience that stands in deliberate contrast to the traditional museum white cube.

Curators: Karen Archey, Head of Curatorial Department of K20K21 and Doris Krystof
Curatorial Assistant: Sebastian Peter

Stay connected: Please check our website for regular updates on our program. For further information please contact presse@kunstsammlung.de.