Rafaël Rozendaal in conversation with Eva & Franco Mattes
talk • 10 Dec 2021 6:30pm–7:30pm
Join exhibiting artist Rafaël Rozendaal in conversation with artists Eva & Franco Mattes as they discuss their work, the exhibition and how digital practice is changing.
The past 18 months has seen a huge shift in how artists are making and presenting work, with much more emphasis being placed on digital production and presenting. Through this conversation, the artists will discuss what has changed, how artists are working, how galleries and platforms are exhibiting and what that might mean for the future of digital practice.
Image credit: Eva & Franco
Artists
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazillian visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. Since 1999 Rozendaal has been making websites as artworks, unique abstract compositions coded with ever generating algorithms. His websites attract 40 million visits per year. He also creates installations, tapestries, lenticulars, haiku, lectures, and a podcast.
He’s exhibited in Times Square, and Centre Pompidou, Valencia Biennial, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, TSCA Gallery Tokyo, Seoul Art Square and Stedelijk Museum amongst others. Rozendaal is a pioneer in the idea of collecting digital art in the form of websites. Since first creating these digital works, they have been sold to collectors who become the owners via a dedicated domain name. His early and ongoing digital sales served as a precursor to NFTs, predicting the idea of digital art collecting. Now Rozendaal uses hosts Artblocks to produce NFTs, in particular a series that has gone on raise over $400K for arts and tech organisation Rhizome.
Eva & Franco Mattes are an artist duo based in New York. They have continually made work that responds to and dissects our contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a darkly humorous edge. They have exhibited at Sharjah Art Foundation, SFMOMA, Athens Biennale, Fondation Phi, Fotomuseum Winterthur (Zurich, 2021) and Site Gallery (Sheffield).(2018); . In 2001 they were among the youngest artists ever included in the Venice Biennale. Their works can be found in the collections of the SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, X Museum, and the Walker Art Center. They are part of the collective Don’t Follow the Wind, a collaborative project that organized an inaccessible exhibition in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone (2015-present).