Gabriel Massan (Brazilian, b. 1996) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working across 3D animation, digital sculpture, games, sound and interactive installations.,Through a practice they call fictional archaeology, they build worlds that simulate and narrate situations of inequality within the Latin American experience.,Massan grew up in Rio de Janeiro before relocating to Berlin in 2020.
They taught themselves 3D worldbuilding after an unsatisfying degree in video art, disillusioned with what they saw as the classist and conservative character of Brazilian art institutions.Since 2017 they have made a recurring cast of intricately textured digital figures they call sculpture-actors, used across films, installations and games.
Commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies with the Julia Stoschek Collection, Massan's project Third World: The Bottom Dimension launched at Serpentine in London in June 2023 as a collaborative video game, exhibition and set of web3 tokens on Tezos.,The game reimagines the classification 'Third World' as a fictional planet inhabited by monstrous characters who question colonial and hegemonic narratives.Massan made it with the artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar, LYZZA, Jota Mombaça and Ventura Profana.The game's nonlinear narrative draws on Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva's book Unpayable Debt (2022) to explore the precarious conditions of Black and Indigenous peoples.The project later traveled to Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo as the exhibition “Third World – The Bottom Dimension”, on view from August 2024 to February 2025.
In 2022 Massan was named to the Dazed 100 and received commissions from the Bangkok Biennale and the X Museum in Beijing.,Their work has also been shown in the group exhibition “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” at the Julia Stoschek Collection and Centre Pompidou-Metz, and they were a finalist for the 2024 Circa Prize.,Massan reappropriates gaming culture to subvert the hyper-masculine history of video game art, alongside artists such as La Turbo Avedon.
