Eva & Franco Mattes: Most to Least Viewed

Since the 1990s Eva & Franco Mattes have kept a close eye on the Internet and its IRL entanglements, establishing a provocative body of work that runs the gamut from VR to sculpture. In a long-overdue homecoming, the pair stage their first Italian solo exhibition at FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive. Most to Least Viewed presents a spectrum of works from their recent oeuvre, selected by a mysterious algorithm.  The exhibition is curated by Nadim Samman.

Internet culture is conditioned by processes that take place out of sight. The attention economy metric of likes and views obscures our alienation from the inner workings of the platform, and its IRL entanglements: User Experience Design proposes a simplified relation to the system, establishing a liminal zone where reality, fantasy, and power intersect. Additionally, a flux of content represses context—the conditions which underpin image creation, factors influencing the visibily of such images, systems of circulation, and more. Most to Least Viewed probes this tension, taking up the relation between what is put on display and that which remains hidden.  

Laid out in sequence from “most to least viewed”, the exhibition’s content mirrors the valence of the artists’ oeuvre across social media and web in the last twelve months. What works have done well is clear, but why this has happened is veiled in shadow. Why was a piece even in a position to be liked or viewed in the first place? In foregrounding the impossibility of answering this question, while presenting the results of an obscure technical process, the artists allude to the role of alien curatorial forces at play of the broader sweep of our lives.  

Beyond the exhibition’s selection criteria, the works in Eva & Franco Mattes: Most to Least Viewed also express the artist’s longstanding interest in degrees of informational opacity, and the strange panorama of online culture. In the featured works, Eva & Franco Mattes elucidate the political interior of surface effects, examining censorship operations in social media; distortions of “natural” life engendered by digital tools, privileged access to secure domains, and increasingly untenable desires to disconnect. Throughout, the pair pay close attention to the possibility that the absurdiy of Internet culture may be a ‘feature’ and not a bug.  Always, within the pair’s art, which holds up a mirror to information society, things are more than meets the eye. 

Eva & Franco Mattes are an Italian artist duo based in New York City. They make work that responds to and dissects our contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a hint of dark humor. Group exhibitions include KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates); SFMOMA, San Francisco; Athens Biennale; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim (Germany); Biennale of Sydney; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Minneapolis Institute of Arts (US); Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City; MoMA PS1 and Performa in New York City; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; The New Museum, New York City and Manifesta 4, Frankfurt (Germany). Survey exhibitions of their work have been held at Fondation PHI, Montreal (Canada), and at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich 2021. Past solo exhibition venues include Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (Germany); Team Gallery, Los Angeles; Essex Flowers and Postmasters Gallery, New York City; Carroll/Fletcher Gallery, London; and Site Gallery, Sheffield. Their works can be found in the collections of the SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), X Museum, and the Walker Art Center (US).

Nadim Samman is Curator for the Digital Sphere at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Hours: Wednesday–Friday 11am–1pm, 4–7pm / Saturday–Sunday and public holidays 11am–7pm
During festival filosofia: Friday, September 16–Saturday September 17 9am–11pm / Sunday, September 18 9am–9pm

More info: biglietteria [​at​] fmav.org