Your curatorial practice often engages with networked image culture and digital discourse. How does Crit Club: Meme Debates build on ideas you’ve previously explored in your work?

In my curatorial practice, I explore how art engages with technology—not only as a subject, but also as a material and mechanism. I’m interested in practices that deal with circulation of digital objects across mediums, which can be between digital platforms and physical manifestations. For example, in the Out of Office exhibition at IMPAKT back in 2022, we showed the work Auto Sleep (2016-ongoing) by Mario Santamaría. The work takes the form of an automatic email response, which the artist actually uses in his personal inbox to inform senders that he’s unavailable because he’s asleep. This resulted in people emailing him to receive the auto-reply in their own inbox, bringing the work back to its native environment of the internet. Crit Club at IMPAKT continues my collaboration with Cem A., for whom I previously wrote texts for both the Critical Meme Reader and his solo exhibition Zentrum für Kritik und Memes at ZKM in Karlsruhe. Building on these notions of networked culture outside of the internet, the exhibition uses memetic strategies to dive into debates about memes, as a way to open up bigger societal questions about digital culture in relation to institutionalization and polarization. 

Debates in the art world can often feel constrained by unspoken rules and shared professional norms. In Crit Club, participants argue unrealistic debate topics, creating a space for both humor and critique. How do you think humor functions as a tool for critique in the art world, and do you see it as a way to subvert expectations of what art should be serious about?

Memes can be a means of articulating and voicing critique in a way that institutions don’t always get to do. The position of the meme-maker, as someone supposedly outside the art circuit, although increasingly becoming a part of it nowadays, allows for a critical distance from the art world. Humour then becomes a tool to point at the bizarity of mechanisms and phenomena that we take for granted. What makes us laugh is often rooted in something deeply personal. Many meme accounts speak to experiences of precarity, alienation, or burnout, functioning as both coping mechanisms and forms of solidarity. By framing difficult subjects in a humorous, seemingly lighthearted way, memes can open the door to conversations that might otherwise feel inaccessible. They create entry points for dialogue—which then opens space for other forms and tangible actions to follow up on that. At Crit Club, humour is woven into the exhibition’s conceptual framework—even when the topics under discussion are serious. The format’s enforced binary approach to debate becomes a playful method of highlighting the complexity and nuance of memes and digital culture.

In your essay “Memes in the Gallery: A Party Inside an Image Ecology” from the Critical Meme Reader II, you discuss Cem A.’s solo exhibition The Party at Weserhalle, examining how memes move fluidly between digital and physical spaces while challenging or reinforcing art world hierarchies. Crit Club similarly brings digital discourse into a physical setting but introduces a performative element. How do you see Crit Club extending or complicating the dynamics of meme exhibitions like The Party at Weserhalle? Does the performative aspect shift the kind of critique that’s possible?

The exhibition extends Cem A.’s ongoing practice as a meme-maker through his account @freeze_magazine, and takes shape as a manifestation of the logic of virality and online mechanisms. While The Party quite literally recreated a meme-as-image within an installation format, Crit Club delves further into the performative nature of memes. Because memes live through the ways they’re adapted, shared, and recontextualized by people, they’re inherently performative—dynamic acts rather than static images. As such, memes can also be seen as gestures or cultural acts. The exhibition is then focused on the debates and the larger framework of Crit Club as a formula, making it much less palatable to circulate in its entirety back onto the internet. But we still play with that notion of multi-modality, for instance, through inviting two meme-makers to respond to the debate. At its core, the exhibition then also underlines that memes are in fact an important part of our contemporary culture, that require critical analysis, precisely because of the way they reflect, distort, and shape the world around us.

The format of Crit Club is structured around the two live performances consisting of a sports competition as well as an art and meme debate. As a curator, how do you see this format shaping audience engagement compared to more traditional exhibition formats?

Crit Club is taking an experimental approach by transforming the exhibition space into a sports arena for debate. In that environment, we invite people to consider what conversations about the arts and digital culture can learn from competition in sports. By programming boxing and taekwondo exercises alongside debates about digital culture, we’re asking audiences to consider the parallels and differences between these two formats. It is a distinct formula by Cem A., which he conceived over various editions, and aims to bring new energy into panel talks in which there is not always space for disagreement or alternative viewpoints. The exhibition then extends the debate-as-match, by further contextualising Crit Club and adding various layers of reflection and analysis to the debates.

Visit the exhibition Crit Club: Meme Debates from 18 May until 29 June at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture], or visit one of the two live debates on 18 May and 8 June.