In the season finale of the media majlis museum podcast, we're joined by one of the exhibition's curators Amal Ali and contributing artist Anne Horel, for a retrospective look at the groundbreaking Memememememe exhibition at Northwestern Qatar. The discussion reveals the exhibition's origins, which began as a two-to-three-year process focused on social movements before landing on memes as a powerful, often anonymous, tool for engaging with culture and sensitive issues. Anne, a digital artist who uses internet language in her work, discusses her three-channel video installation, Good Soup, a meme culture alterpiece, which explores the feeling of "worshipping the algorithm". Her work, which includes highly viral GIFs with millions of views, highlights the lack of control once content is shared online. The conversation further explores the magical connecting power of memes and GIFs as a new iconographic language, the importance of displaying digital art with the necessary hardware, and the philosophical idea of the internet as a global subconscious.

00:00 The Memememememe Exhibition: A Retrospective

02:53 The Long Journey From Social Movements to Memes

03:56 The Vision Behind the Research-Based University Museum Exhibition

05:18 Scenography as Narrative: The Laundromat Theme

06:00 Anne Horel’s Good Soup, A Meme Culture Alterpiece

07:11 Internet Language as Anne Horel’s Material

08:24 The Themes of Good Soup: Pop Culture Icons and Pedro Pascal

10:40 The "Magical" Feeling of Internet Connection

12:30 Memes and GIFs As a New Language and Grammar

14:00 The Creation Process: A State of "Trance" and the Absurd

15:35 The Memememememe Publication: A Glossary on Emojis and the Global South

16:44 Curating the Exhibition vs. the Publication vs. the Programs

18:51 Museum Culture: Being Irreverent and Welcoming Reaction

20:54 The Changing Way We Consume Images and the Ethics of AI

23:50 Displaying Digital Art: The Need for Hardware and Innovation in the Middle East

25:15 Favorite Pieces: Oran Mad Dog's Memory and Memes as Intangible Heritage

26:38 Navigating Political Content and Global South Memes

28:46 Comic Sans and Times as Memes

29:57 Is the Internet One Place or Many? The Global Subconscious

31:30 Permanent Data by Drone Van: A Metaphor for Meme Culture

33:40 Anne Horel on Retrieving Data from Broken Hard Drives

34:36 How Anne Horel and the Museum Found Each Other

39:01 Museum's Use of Memes

41:48 Speak the Language of Your Audience

44:41 The Ethics of AI, Children, and Parental Responsibility

52:03 Memes in Art History and Preserving Digital Artifacts

57:21 The Evolution of Meme Cycles and Predicting the Future

Amal Ali is a museum curator and cultural producer based in Qatar. She's currently a curatorial exhibition manager at Northwestern University in Qatar. 

Connect with Amal Ali 👉 https://www.instagram.com/amalgam8or/

Anne Horel is a French visual artist, director and writer born in 1984. Known for her maximalist, polymorphous and satirical universe, she has spent over a decade developing a visual language that blends digital collage, pop culture, absurdist humor, experimental animation and hybrid storytelling, deeply rooted in digital culture and technologies. Represented by Galerie Julie Caredda (Paris), she has exhibited at Art Basel Miami, Palais de Tokyo, Times Square, as well as in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, the UAE, Colombia and Turkey, and has won multiple awards including the Audi Talent Award in 2017. 

Connect with Anne Horel 👉 https://instagram.com/annehorel

Hosted by Mikey Muhanna 👉 https://instagram.com/mikey_mu

Theme music: Peninsular, Tarek Yamani 🔊 

https://spoti.fi/47I59nsa

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