Gabriel Massan

Biography

Gabriel Massan (b. 1996, Nilópolis, Brazil) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary digital artist investigating notions of strangeness and ignorance regarding the imaginary of the 'Third World.' Massan builds an archive of sculptures and digital objects, which he calls sculpture-actors, that recur across installations, films, and games, drawing on early formative interests in Japanese and Hong Kong cinema, theater, and gaming rather than a traditional fine-art background. His major project, Third World: The Bottom Dimension, commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies in association with the Julia Stoschek Collection and powered by Tezos, is a game-based work and expanded installation created in collaboration with artists and thinkers including LYZZA, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novissimo Edgar, and Ventura Profana. Referencing Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva's book Unpayable Debt, the project reimagines the term Third World not as a colonial classification but as a speculative new planet inhabited by monstrous characters who question colonial and hegemonic narratives. Massan's practice has moved progressively through digital sculpture, video art, augmented and virtual reality, motion capture, gaming, and most recently artificial intelligence, treating each medium as a tool he teaches himself from scratch rather than inherits from established industry training. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, BOZAR in Brussels, and HEK Basel, and continues to explore themes of migration, queerness, Black and Indigenous existential precarity, and collective feeling across the many territories he has moved through, from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo to Berlin.