The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) plays a critical role in contemporary art in Australia by bringing pioneering global artistic practices to local audiences. On Saturday 18 July, the Fortitude Valley gallery opens major solo exhibition by acclaimed Canadian artist Jon Rafman, Memento Hikikomori. 

‘It’s an exciting opportunity to work with Rafman on his first institutional, Australian, solo exhibition’, says Curator and IMA Assistant Director Programs, Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer. ‘Rafman has been at the cutting edge of contemporary art and technology since the late 2000s. His practice always seems to tell the future of what our relationships with screens, media, and each other will look like. I think audiences at the IMA will be shocked and entranced by what he has to show us’. 

Rafman’s approach is exploratory and anthropological, scraping the recesses of the internet as he charts the dark heart of the digital world. Surveying our networked lives, he offers a prescient examination of online alienation and a taste of our mortal futures. 

Memento Hikikomori brings together works that contend with the technological mediation of memory, the formation of selfhood and identity, and the unconscious of collective online experience. The title combines memento mori (remembering our mortality) and hikikomori (Japan’s reclusive adolescent hermits). Emblematic of our contemporary moment, Rafman likens these individuals to modern ascetics, cultivating detachment from earthly desires and disappearing into online worlds.  

In Nine Eyes (2008–), Rafman trawls through billions of Google Street View photographs finding human moments that rupture the cold, machinic mapping of cities and suburbs. An ambitious act of world-building, Main Stream Media Network (2025–6) is an evolving, AI-generated TV channel, like an MTV broadcast from a parallel dimension.  

Creating work at the forefront of technology and art, Rafman’s use of AI is not moralistic or didactic, but curious. He highlights how nostalgia feeds into generative AI models, revealing the libidinal darkness of youth culture. 

Memento Hikikomori also includes AI-generated paintings, reclusive video-viewing pods, and key Rafman videos—including Punctured Sky (2021), Still Life (Betamale) (2013), and Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008–11).  

Rafman’s ambitious exhibition opens Saturday 18 July, with opening celebrations on Friday 17 July 2026.