Simon Denny is one of the leading and earliest artists who explored blockchain culture. While his prolific practice extends across many territories, it is focused on the aesthetics, cultures and values behind contemporary technologies and the organisations and people that produce them. Over the course of the last decade since the birth of crypto, Denny has made many iconic and now art historically significant contributions to the visualisation and interrogation of blockchain within the contemporary art environment. Thinking about crypto since 2016 when he exhibited one of the earliest major installations addressing blockchains, "Blockchain Future States" at the 9th Berlin Biennale, he has also curated groundbreaking exhibitions of artists that interact with blockchains, including "Proof of Work" at the Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin) in 2018. For many younger artists working today, these projects and his own work acted as important catalysts that paved the way for the development of the entire ecosystem.

Denny released his first set of NFTs with the pioneering Left Gallery in 2019, and again this year with releases on Superrare as part of his recent exhibition this April at Petzel Gallery in New York. From Superrare to the Venice Biennale, Denny reflects a singular artist who bridges both the crypto art world and the art world proper.

Backdated NFT/ Ethereum postage stamp (2016-2018-2021) reflects Denny’s rigorous conceptual practice, his provocative, testing nature, and his deep understanding of blockchain. It is a quiet complex work with major implications for the entirety of the NFT space. In Denny’s own words “It claims to do the impossible: to mint an NFT in the past”. Playfully playing with one of the major questions and criticisms levelled at NFTs, Denny takes a physical artwork he made about Ethereum and its founder Vitalik Buterin in 2016, and after t.mes stamping it with a rubber stamp showing the information of an unrelated NFT issued in 2018, proceeds to backdate his NFT. In a world where blockchain’s are held up as an immutable record of permanence, how has Denny managed to do this? And what does it suggest about the continued viability of the entire blockchain space? The majority of NFTs are held on decentralized servers with the NFT itself including a hyperlink that points to the work on that server. The major issue here that Denny cleverly exploits is that if you have access while you can’t change the link you can change the image on the link. Tinkering provocatively with the very pillars the NFT community stand on, the work stands as a classic Duchampian gesture. It is a work that sits as the latest exemplar of medium specificity, which is the that the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material. Technically proficient, controversial, probings , conceptual clear, Backdated NFT stands for all the trademark tropes that Denny has employed over a distinguished artistic career.