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Updated 12 Nov 2026
Orkhan Mammadov (b. 1990) is an artist living and working in San Francisco whose room-scale moving-image installations, custom software and sculptural LED works study synthetic confabulation across human recall, institutional archives and machine learning.
Orkhan Mammadov (b. 1990) is an artist living and working in San Francisco. Across room-scale moving-image installations, custom software and sculptural LED works, he studies confabulation across human recall, institutional archives and machine learning: how missing context is filled with plausible reconstruction, and how that reconstruction acquires the authority to replace evidence. Working with computer vision, generative networks, cellular automata and hand-written code, he leaves the apparatus in view, from bounding boxes and loss curves to exposed rear cabling.
In 2026 his work was presented in As Above, So Below, a Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale (Conversations with Nature's Memory); in the UCCN Pavilion of the 16th Gwangju Biennale at G.MAP, curated by Kim HeoKyung and Kim Hana (The Idea of Saving Aesthetics 3.0); and in two solo installations, Visions and The Idea of Saving Aesthetics 2.0, at Art Club, POST Houston. Earlier museum and biennale presentations include Memememory at Media Majlis Museum, Doha (2025); Timeless at Saatchi Gallery, London (2024); the 8th Moscow Biennale at the State Tretyakov Gallery (2019); the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); and Lunchmeat Festival at the National Gallery Prague (2017, 2019).
When a record has a gap, human recall, museum classification and generative models share a habit: they fill what is missing with a plausible reconstruction and pass the result off as complete. Neurology calls this confabulation. My work studies how such reconstructions acquire the authority to stand in for evidence, and builds installations, software and sculptural displays where that substitution can be watched.
In Visions, a mirrored LED room at Art Club, POST Houston, and 666 interactive works built from public-domain paintings at the Met, the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum and the Belvedere, each viewer action cuts a passage out by computer vision and fills the gap by generative inpainting, permanently overwriting the prior state. Retrieval alters the trace. Lost Memories from Latent Space and Rêveries stop the network earlier, at the layer activations and feature correlations that precede any named object.
Machine learning did not invent this problem; it automated older habits of editing and classification. Eastern Promises runs object detection and clustering across 8,000 nineteenth-century European Orientalist paintings and exposes a canon that already operated as a self-reinforcing synthetic dataset. Memememory tracks thirty-five years of internet memes from 1990 to 2025 as recursive copying and compression strip away original context. The manuscript albums behind Muraqqa had been cut, remounted and reattributed for centuries before a camera touched them. In Singularity in Heritage (more than 150,000 archival textile images), The Idea of Saving Aesthetics and Relic, I treat carpets as counted-grid storage systems whose unnamed weavers were displaced first by Western dealer taxonomies and then by statistical averages; in Relic, curled LED panels swap hand-tied knots for exposed rear cabling.
I live and work in San Francisco, where statistical reconstruction is routinely sold as intelligence. Across my rooms and screens I leave the machinery in view: bounding boxes, confidence scores, loss curves, wiring and erasures that cannot be undone. Two recent projects test what happens outside mass scraping. Conversations with Nature's Memory sets two simulated ecosystems across a soil line alongside 106 silent neural cellular automata of 2,632 parameters each; its AI writes only broken fragments and refuses to fake a translation of fungal signalling. Kenerative is a procedural drawing grammar written by hand, studied from Shipibo-Konibo kené in museum collections, with no training set and its outsider position stated plainly.
Visions
Art Club, POST Houston, Houston, USA
2026
The Idea of Saving Aesthetics 2.0
Art Club, POST Houston, Houston, USA
Curated by Orkhan
2026
FLUX Melting carpets
Art in Space Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2023
Revival of Aesthetics 2.0
Kanvas Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2023
RELIC
Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, UAE
2022
Revival of Aesthetics
Theatre of Digital Art, Dubai, UAE
2022
2 Point Perspective
Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2016
VOID
Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2015
Gwangju Biennale
G.MAP, Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju, South Korea
Curated by Kim HeoKyung and Kim Hana
Memememememe
Media Majlis Museum, Northwestern University in Qatar, Doha, Qatar
Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali
Visions
Istanbul, Turkiye
2025
Carpetdiem Experiments
TAEX, Dubai, UAE
2025
Carpetdiem Experiments
Asprey Studio, London, UK
2023
Carpetdiem
Boulevard Crescent, Downtown Dubai, Dubai, UAE
2023
Miami Web3 Summit
Miami, USA
2022
Rhizomatic
Museum of the Future, Dubai, UAE
Curated by MORROW collective
2022
B3 Biennale of Moving Images
Frankfurt, Germany
2022
Cosmoscow
Gostiny Dvor, Moscow, Russia
2022
Generative Gallery Showcase
Saint Petersburg, Russia
2022
Tomorrow NFT showcase
Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, Israel
2022
Miami Art Basel
Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami, USA
2021
Contemporary Istanbul
Tersane Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkiye
2021
Future of Textile
Baku, Azerbaijan
2021
Moscow International Contemporary Art Biennale
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Curated by Dmitry Chernyakov
2019
Lunchmeat Festival
Trade Fair Palace, Prague, Czech Republic
2019
Dave Festival
Sektor Evolution, Dresden, Germany
2018
Gamma Festival
Saint Petersburg, Russia
2018
Lunchmeat Festival
Veletrzni Palac Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
2017
Intervals Festival
Nizhpoligraph, Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia
2017
Yarat! Public Art Festival
Yarat! Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2013
2022
B3 Biennial of the Moving Image / HfG Offenbach
B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (10th Anniversary Edition) The award for Best AI Based Crypto Art goes to Orkhan Mammadov. He is a pioneering media artist from Azerbaijan whose sculptures and paintings are driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning. His works reflect the rapid technological changes in the global context by rethinking the art and cultural heritage of the Middle East.
2025
OpenAI
A work from the Visions series, licensed to OpenAI for a film they published in December 2025.
View2023
Paul&Shark
The A.I. Odyssey, a generative work made for Paul&Shark from the brand's own archive and steered toward its themes of sea life, patterns, yachts and nature. Curated by Art in Space, with HCOMM as technology partner.
2020 — 2021
Global School for Entrepreneurship · Amsterdam, Netherlands
2014 — 2015
Prague College · Prague, Czechia
2012 — 2013
Istanbul Bilgi University · Istanbul, Türkiye
2008 — 2010
Khazar University · Baku, Azerbaijan
"As above, so below" annuncia il gran finale in occasione della giornata mondiale degli oceani
VeneziaToday
Farah Piriye Coene on Curating, Borders and ‘AS ABOVE, SO BELOW’ at La Biennale di Venezia 2026
FORA Gallery
Una mostra collettiva a Venezia mette gli oceani al centro della riflessione
d la Repubblica · Deborah Ameri
La mostra che ci costringe a metterci nei panni di un cetaceo e a fare i conti con l’impatto dell’inquinamento acustico negli oceani
Corriere della Sera · Costanza Longhini
«L’oceano è uno, noi siamo parte di tutto»: Elizabeth Zhivkova racconta ‘As Above, So Below’
Revenews · Redazione
‘As Above, So Below’, Farah Piriye Coene: «L’arte per il cambiamento»
Revenews · Redazione
Speciale Venezia: 5 mostre collaterali alla Biennale Arte 2026
Itinerarinellarte.it · Redazione
At the Venice Biennale, an exhibition to reflect on the future of the oceans
Collater.al · Anna Frattini
Il canto segreto degli scorfani e le danze luminose del plancton: tutto quello che il mare ci sta dicendo e che noi non stiamo ascoltando
Vanity Fair Italia · Valeria Vantaggi
A Living Field of Artistic Exchange: 15 Must-See Events Enriching the Venice Biennale 2026 Experience
Contemporary Lynx · Timika Sukhai
The Venice Biennale exhibition praised by the New York Times: whales, plankton, and trees in one great voice
La Sicilia · Redazione La Sicilia
In Venice, an Ocean-Inspired Exhibition Takes Visitors Under the Sea
The New York Times · Keridwen Cornelius
Venice Biennale 2026, the ocean at the center of the As Above, So Below exhibition at Giudecca
Finestre sull'Arte · Redazione
I versi dei cetacei, la bioluminescenza del plancton e i segnali bioelettrici degli ulivi tra arte e scienza. L’evento “As Above, So Below” per immergersi negli abissi (e non solo)
Corriere della Sera · Alessandra Nardini
Venice Biennale 2019, the ten best national pavilions according to Finestre Sull'Arte
Finestresullarte
B3 Festival of the Moving Image
B3 Festival of the Moving Image · B3 Festival of the Moving Image
Sikka Art & Design Festival presents stunning photography and digital art
Government of Dubai Media Office · Traffic Digital
“Excavating EX Machina” multimedia exhibition imagines the ruins of a post-decadent art and tech world
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
Crypto Oasis Metaverse Collection launch Azerbaijani visual artist Orkhan Mammadov into regional ecosystem
Khaleej Times · A Staff Reporter
Orkhan Mammadov: Singularity in Heritage presented by GAZELL.iO | OpenSea
Opensea · Opensea Crew
Digital tapestries: the vibrant AI-powered rug-work of Orkhan Mammadov
Stirworld · STIR world
Revolutionizing Art with AI: Orkhan Mammadov - Magzoid Magazine
Magzoid Magazine · Erica Flynn
Abrió Art Dubai, una feria que se abre paso en el exotismo y los paradigmas que plantea el metaverso
El Destape · Mercedes Ezquiaga
How contemporary storytelling is changing art, design, architecture, society, behavior, and much more.
Global Design News · Global Design News
Crypto Oasis Metaverse Collection launch Azerbaijani visual artist Orkhan Mammadov into regional ecosystem
Aze.Media · AzeMedia
Orkhan Mammadov uses digital art to raise awareness on the importance of cultural heritage - identity
identity · Aidan Imanova
Revival of Aesthetics - A.I. Driven Immersive New Media Art Experience & NFT drop by Orkhan Mammadov - DGN Gate
DGN Gate · DGN Gate
‘The Revival Of Aesthetics’ By Digital Artist Orkhan Mammadov - ADAM IN TOWN
ADAM IN TOWN · Alexander Koko
Artist Orkhan establishes new standards for cultural design in latest digital artworks
Métro Liberté · Métro Liberté
Human art meets technology as NFT artist Orkhan brings new cultural works to light with AI - Digital Weekday
Digital Weekday · Newsdesk
Von Video bis KI – zwei Medienkunst-Positionen auf der Biennale Venedig
Aktuell - Kulturell · anjagebauer
Orkhan Mammadov: concept of my installation at Moscow Biennale - preserving aesthetics of Azerbaijan
Vestikavkaza · Maria Petrova
Le fake news in mostra alla Biennale di Venezia 2019
La valigia dell'artista · richardchance84
Works of local artists, sculptors presented at 58th Venice Biennale
Azernews.Az · Abdul Kerimkhanov