Poetics of Encryption
Group Exhibition
Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague
Through May 11, 2025

We rely on digital tools for many things, yet rarely understand how they work. Our ignorance and lack of power with respect to encrypted systems is difficult to endure. How does this situation register in art? This group exhibition builds upon the recent book Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene by Nadim Samman. It explores the crypt in encryption, surveying an imaginative landscape marked by Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes. These terms indicate how emerging tech captures users; how it works in secret; and how it distorts cultural space-time. In the latent space between exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, questing, and speculation concerning technology’s inside, there unfolds an emergent poetic of encryption.

Phantom Vision
Group Exhibition
Light Art Museum, Budapest
Through July 1, 2025

The exhibition delves into the sub-surface layers of perception, the world of sights and unusual experiences that appear behind our closed eyes. Into the deep layers swirling beneath the surface of reality visible to the naked eye: the realm of dream, hallucination, meditative trance, the all-pervasive yet inaudible frequencies, the images that appear behind closed eyelids and the phosphenes that sparkle up in the uncontrolled activity of neural pathways.

The Lure of the Image
Group Exhibition
Fotomuseum Winterthur
May 15–October 12, 2025

This exhibition explores the seductive powers of photographic images online, maps the mechanisms of the lure, and investigates how seduction and desire, affect and drive, are embedded in contemporary visual culture. How do images entice or beguile us, how do they control, bait or deceive us? What digital and networked logics underpin the persuasive attraction of images and what new forms of seduction have they spawned? Selected positions from artists and photographers alongside commissioned works critically investigate, creatively subvert and actively resist the lure(s) of the image.

Lucid Dreams
Group Exhibition
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Through October 18, 2025

The exhibition engages with the universal theme of dreams, crossing boundaries of time and geography to investigate dreams in art, material culture, and new media from a multicultural perspective. It presents ancient headrests, illuminated Jewish, Islamic, and Christian manuscripts, Chinese dream stones and Japanese Zen prints together with works in a range of mediums by artists from the last three centuries, from Goya’s powerful Sleep of Reason through Surrealist visions to contemporary international and Israeli creations. All of these express humanity’s shared, never-ending desire to touch the dream and interpret it.

Jon Rafman
Nine Eyes
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
October 8, 2025–January 11, 2026

Canadian artist Jon Rafman is renowned for a multifaceted work that revolves around our relationship with digital technologies and surveillance. He will often use images and stories from the internet, which he adapts and reworks seeking to cast an empathetic and critical look at the way technologies affect modern life – emotionally, socially and existentially. Nine Eyes, considered a major work in contemporary art, is presented for the first time in a standalone exhibition. Rafman's pioneering project, which has been developing since 2008, focuses on both the everyday and the existential aspects of life in the age of digital surveillance.

Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
February 15–May 3, 2025
Los Angeles

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Proof of Concept, Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, which features a groundbreaking installation that reimagines television for the AI age. Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content – a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.

Jon Rafman
𝐸𝒷𝓇𝒶𝒽 𝒦'𝒹𝒶𝒷𝓇𝒾
February 3–March 25, 2023
London

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to announce Jon Rafman's first solo exhibition at the London gallery. In his latest works, the artist harnesses the creative potential of machine learning processes, continuing his long-standing practice of investigating the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. The exhibition in London features both algorithmically generated paintings and video projections that explore new permutations of appropriated content, encompassing everything from fine art to mass marketing material.

Rafman incorporates the rich vocabulary and visuality of online worlds to develop poetic narratives that critically engage with the present, creating works that capture the tension between the indifferent eye of the machine and the human impulse to find meaning.

Jon Rafman
Counterfeit Poast
September 17–November 12, 2022
Berlin

In his new solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Jon Rafman presents an immersive space with recent works which explore themes of nostalgia, youth, false memory, and the fragmentation of the individual. He harnesses the creative potential of machine learning and continues his long-standing practice of using the latest technology to bring its subterranean implications to the surface.

Jon Rafman
Nine Eyes of Google Street View
June 25–July 25, 2020
Online

Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View series (2007–present), an ever-expanding collection of screenshots from the Street View feature of Google Maps, signify in ways that are multiple, ambiguous, and puzzling. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Rafman captures moments that are both unique and universal.

He writes: “This very way of recording our world, this paradoxical relationship between an automated camera filming and a human who seeks connectedness and meaning”.

Jon Rafman
Dream Journal '16 -'17
September 16, 2017–January 20, 2018
Berlin

In Dream Journal 2016-2017, the latest iteration in his ongoing video series, Jon Rafman has created an immersive installation within the Berlin space. Rafman is recognized for an interdisciplinary practice that spans photography, sculpture, video, virtual reality, and installation. His work explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness, incorporating the rich vocabulary of online worlds to create poetic narratives that critically engage with the present.

Jon Rafman, Stan VanDerBeek
Jon Rafman / Stan VanDerBeek
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen

January 20–March 4, 2017
Los Angeles

Memory comes to live through action in the present. We give life to memory through the present but when we do not give life to memory, it fades away. —J. Krishnamurti

This exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, introduces films and animations by Jon Rafman and Stan VanDerBeek, two artists from different generations, both exploring and working with associative imagery and their effect on the conditioned and the subconscious mind. Derived from the notion of screens and projections, their installations evolve around an immersive cinema and animation experience.

Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens
Theodora Allen, Slater Bradley, Lucy Dodd, Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, Andy Hope 1930, Oliver Laric, Pew Die Pie, Jon Rafman, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sara VanDerBeek, Stan VanDerBeek, Lesley Vance, Andro Wekua
curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen / GOODROOM
January 29–April 2, 2016
Berlin

Bringing together the practice of thirteen international artists, the exhibition Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens appeals to the intuitive mind and creativity beyond referential thinking. Departing from the artists' production, it navigates through narratives in the realm of surrealist animation, abstraction and subjects of new materialism embracing the logic of the internet.