Jon Rafman, 2016

This poster was produced for Jon Rafman’s 2016 exhibition with Carl Kostyál at Artillergatan in Stockholm. In this exhibition Jon Rafman presented a selection of video works in a series of immersive installations. In Betamale Trilogy, Rafman mines video games, virtual landscapes, and the deep corners of the web for images, text and footage which he collages together to produce poetic narratives that critically engage with the aesthetics and subcultures of online communities. Still Life (Betamale) (2013) plunged us into the depths of  obsessions and transgressions, as the film assembles an unsettling parade of still images, photos, and videos that form a kind of collective crie-de-cœur of online subcultures. Mainsqueeze (2014) continued this exploration, discovering in their arcane obsessions a means of capturing contemporary experience. As ironic detachment alternates with earnest confession, narratives of redemption were evoked but nipped in the bud. In Erysicthon (2015), Rafman extended his examination the depth of human desires through the visual metaphors of data flow.