Tickets

Let’s Get Digital!
NFTs and innovation in digital art

from 18 May 2022
to 31 July 2022

  • Courtyard
  • Strozzina
  • Daily 10.00-20.00
    Thursdays until 23.00
  • Ticket required
  • Amici di Palazzo Strozzi: free

From 18 May to 31 July 2022 the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi will present Let’s Get Digital! a new exhibition bringing the NFT art revolution and the new borderline between the real and the digital to the Strozzina undercroft and the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, featuring works by international artists including Refik Anadol, Anyma, Daniel Arsham, Beeple, Krista Kim and Andrés Reisinger.

 

Promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, and curated by Arturo Galansino (Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Director General) and Serena Tabacchi (Director MoCDA, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art), the exhibition takes visitors on a journey through digital installations and multimedia experiences created by artists who express the new technologies and possibilities of crypto art based on the success of NFTs – certificates of digital authenticity that are redefining the very concept of a work of art’s uniqueness and value. Let’s Get Digital! explores a movement in the grip of evolution and transformation which many consider to be only the starting point for an increasingly rapid intermingling of aesthetics and new technologies, a revolution for the world of art as a whole, digital or otherwise.

 

Standing for Non-Fungible Token, an NFT is a video, an image or any form of digital content that is certified (or “minted”) via a blockchain. This technology encrypts the files and records them in an archive which ensures that a file can be seen by all but owned only by one individual or, to use the correct term, by one ‘wallet’ (an anonymous address identifying the owner). NFTs have offered not only artists but creatives from the worlds of fashion, music, sport, and gaming to explore new dimensions in the interaction between the real and the digital. In this new digital world based on cryptocurrencies, NFTs are populating the so-called metaverse, virtual worlds whose borders stretch into the tangible, conventional world but with new paradigms for social interaction. Assigning value to digital works which by their very nature are open to duplication, this new way of creating and collecting art has fueled an alternative market that is independent of the traditional art market, but above all, has permitted the development of new pathways and opportunities for artists’ production and for public enjoyment, in a novel concept of interconnection on a global level.

Exhibition walkthrough

The exhibition kicks off with a new site-specific installation designed for Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard by Refik Anadol (Turkey, 1985) in a reimagined relationship between digital and physical architecture through a hypnotic, multisensory experience for the visitor. In this dynamic work, artificial intelligence algorithms create illusionistic visions that challenge our notion of reality. The exhibition continues in the undercroft of the Renaissance palace, known as the ‘Strozzina’ which is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art in the heart of Florence. The Strozzina rooms will each be dedicated to a series of immersive works and installations created by the various artists involved. The exhibition will feature works by  Beeple (Mike Winkelmann, USA, 1981), who will be showing a broad selection of his iconic works in which he merges politics, pop culture and irreverent references to today’s world set in dystopic or post-apocalyptic scenarios; Daniel Arsham (USA, 1980), whose work breathes new life into the debate on the very notion of sculpture by creating time loops in which the material and immaterial nature of his creations come together in a ceaseless process of transformation and destruction in perpetual motion; and Krista Kim (United Kingdom, Canada), who urges us with her distinctive minimalist style to enter a world made of impossible reflections and geometries, an immersive space consisting of images that are both dystopic and reassuring at the same time. They are joined in the exhibition by other artists such as Andrés Reisinger (Argentina, 1990), who will be showing Arcadia, a project he produced in conjunction with poetess Arch Hades and composer RAC, in which poetry, sound and image merge in a meditative experience that prompts us to reflect on our daily routine and on the way we use social media; and Anyma (Matteo Millari and Alessio De Vecchi, Italy),a collective that experiments with its work and its live concerts at the point where music and visual performance intersect, and that will be enriching the exhibition with a site-specific physical and visual landscape for one of the Strozzina’s rooms

The exhibition Let’s Get Digital! NFTs and innovation in digital art, promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, is part of the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art programme. Supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Camera di Commercio di Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Palazzo Strozzi Partners’ Committee.