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
