Memememememe
Arts, Culture, and Creativity
2025
How many memes have you seen today? Neatly but incongruously folded into your feed—between war footage and skincare ads, breaking news and matcha selfies—they spread mind to mind, mutating as they travel. We share them, screenshot them, forward them to the group chat. What we almost never do is ask what they are actually doing. This exhibition did.
Client:
Media Majlis Museum
Services:
Concept, Research, Curation, Commissioning, Interpretation, Exhibition Project Management, Editorial Direction
Credits:
Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali with Shepherd Studio (scenography) and Fikra Design Studio (visual identity)
Image credits:
Supplied
The fall 2025 exhibition at the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University in Qatar, curated by Jack Thomas Taylor with Assistant Curator Amal Zeyad Ali, examined memes not as trivial internet content but as ideological practice—shared and repurposed to communicate, critique, amplify dissent, build solidarity, and mock authority. Rather than asking whether memes qualify as art, the exhibition interrogated how they operate: their velocities, their capacity to encode what cannot be said directly, and the trade-offs they carry between visibility and safety, global reach and cultural specificity.
The scenography took its cue from a laundromat. Today, truth arrives pre-washed, spin-dried and neatly folded; the exhibition examined the messy process before the clean result. The metaphor gave the show its interpretive structure—four interconnected themes of Mass, Length, Time and Volume—and made visible the infrastructures and labour behind cultural production that usually stay hidden. Like waiting for your laundry, it required visitors to slow down.
Working with Northwestern Qatar student researchers, the curatorial team collected over 1,000 memes from digital communities across the Global South, selecting works that carry hyper-specific cultural meanings and demonstrate how geography, language, politics and trauma shape what a meme means—and when it turns mean. Alongside this sat newly commissioned works by Anne Horel, SEOHYO, Orkhan Mammadov, Alia Leonardi, Mauro C. Martinez and Eman Makki, together with works by artists including Christine Wang, Eva & Franco Mattes, Abdullah Al Jahdhami and Andreas Refsgaard. WhatsApp stickers became textiles; gaming setups became oil paintings; a viral video became a taxidermy cat on a working robot vacuum.
Jack Thomas Taylor led the concept, curation and full interpretation plan—commissioning briefs, labels, audience journey, accessibility advisories and podcast scripting—while coordinating an international production team across three countries to a fixed opening date. The exhibition was accompanied by the publication and ran from 1 September to 4 December 2025.