Jon Rafman (b. 1981, Montreal) is one of the most significant artists exploring the digital age. Through his videos, films, and immersive installations, he examines how digital culture reshapes desire, identity, and experience. Rafman combines masterfully told stories with digitally generated visual worlds in which opposites, such as sincerity and irony, beauty and the grotesque, and connection and alienation, coexist. In doing so, he draws on Internet subcultures, virtual worlds, and AI-generated images. Rafman creates artificial realities that are seductive yet 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. In addition to his early works, the exhibition features later pieces such as the feature-length video Dream Journal 2016-2019 (2019) , which was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Rafman’s latest work, Main Stream Media Network (2025), evokes the culturally influential MTV of the 1980s with AI-generated music videos.





