Memememememe — How memes became the new folklore of the internet age
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 27
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 30
Location: The Media Majlis Museum, Northwestern University in Qatar, Doha
Date: Sept 1 – Dec 4, 2025
Project: Memememememe — interactive exhibition on the cultural weight of internet memes
Why it Matters: Recasts memes as cultural memory and resistance, not disposable jokes
Enter Memememememe and you walk into a laundromat, where the endless churn of communication cycles through wash, rinse, repeat. That scenography sets the tone for the Media Majlis Museum’s 10th exhibition: a reframing of memes from ephemeral humor into the digital folklore of our time.
Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali, the show assembles an international group of artists who treat memes not as punchlines but as cultural barometers. Mauro C. Martinez paints the excess of reproduced images; Eva & Franco Mattes bring internet ethics and irony into sculptural form; Anne Horel transforms GIFs into visual spells; Cem A. retools the viral sharpness of his @freeze_magazine meme page. Other works pull viewers into interactive zones: Andreas Refsgaard’s deepfake booth lets AI spin new meme identities, while Adnan Aga’s Narrative Laundry literalizes the meme cycle as fabric on a clothesline.
Several artists expand the horizon further. Azerbaijani new media artist Orkhan Mammadov uses generative data sculptures to transform collective memory into immersive environments. Korean artist Seohyo’s animations, born from daily coding practice, stretch from math-driven forms to nature-inspired sequences that have already lit up billboards in Seoul and Barcelona. Their inclusion makes clear that memes aren’t just online jokes — they are part of a global language, circulating across cities, screens, and communities.
Structured around four measures — Mass, Length, Time, and Volume — the exhibition asks: what’s the true weight of memes? In doing so, Memememememe positions them as collective archives and tools of dissent, bridging humor and urgency. The show also doubles as a marker: the museum’s 5th anniversary, and its commitment to examining the media forces shaping cultural memory in real time.
