The Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University (Qatar) presents Memememememe, an immersive exhibition that explores the world of memes and their role in contemporary culture. Here, memes are positioned as complex cultural artefacts: carriers of identity, humour, politics, and social belonging. The title of the show gestures toward the viral mutability of memes and the self-referential nature of online culture, where “me, me, me” often becomes the centre of attention. Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali, the exhibition will run through 4 December 2025.
The show is structured around four conceptual measures: Mass, Length, Time, and Volume. Each concept reflects a different aspect of meme circulation: the number of people who engage and remix them, the distance they travel across languages and geographies, the lifespan they enjoy before fading or mutating, and the intensity with which they saturate media spaces. The exhibition’s inventive scenography transforms the museum into a laundromat-like environment, suggesting the endless cycles of repetition, reuse, and reinvention that define the meme ecosystem.
Featuring works by artists from several countries, the exhibition encourages visitors to consider how unstable meaning has become in an age shaped by rapid digital exchange. Among the highlights is Permanent Data (2020) by Dutch artist Jeroen van Loon, a 12-kilometre fibre-optic cable encoded with the full text of the Gutenberg Bible and thousands of YouTube comments reflecting on data loss and digital decay. This striking juxtaposition questions what, if anything, truly endures amid the endless circulation of information.
The exhibition also includes Narrative Laundry, an installation that uses washing machines as a metaphor for the way memes are scrubbed clean, reused, and passed between online communities. Equally memorable is Roomba Cat (2023) by the internet-art duo Eva and Franco Mattes: a taxidermy cat mounted atop a robotic vacuum cleaner. It echoes a once-viral video while inviting visitors to reflect on how memes can collapse the boundary between physical and digital reality.
Other artworks on view continue this exploration of transformation and cultural reinvention. The Last Jedi (2013) by Saudi artist Abdullah Al Jahdhami reveals how memes migrate far beyond their original contexts, acquiring new meanings as they circulate. In Sarcastic Willy Wonka (2020), American artist Christine Tien Wang translates a viral image into a monumental acrylic painting. Thus, she confronts the tension between the fleeting nature of online memes and the permanence associated with fine art.
There is also the interactive “Meme-bership Photobooth,” which allows visitors to turn themselves into a meme. It underscores the exhibition’s central idea that, in today’s digital landscape, we are not only consumers of memes but producers of them as well.
Memememememe ultimately asks one to rethink a form of communication so familiar that it often goes unquestioned. In a time when digital media saturates everyday life, the exhibition reveals that memes are never neutral: they carry humour and irony, but also emotional charge, social critique, nostalgia, and sometimes ideological power. By slowing down the rapid pace of consumption and inviting reflection, the Media Majlis Museum highlights how memes shape collective memory, influence public discourse and bind communities together across borders.
To get more information about Memememememe, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
Additionally, you might be interested in exploring Projects of Art Ethnography at the Project Space.
