After @freeze_magazine began to gain traction, your practice evolved from making digital memes to manifesting them as physical interventions in space. Currently, you are leading the project Crit Club, a performance intended to create a space where open disagreements can occur in order to foster a more critical culture. How did the work you made for @freeze_magazine evolve into the current project with such a focus on discourse?

This wasn’t a conscious shift, but looking back, you could almost describe freeze_magazine as a kind of ethnographic or anthropological field study. It emerged as a way to document my own lived experience—alongside the experiences of others I observed—within the art world, through the lens of memes. Crit Club is a direct outcome of that practice. It also fictionalises and aestheticises the art world, addressing its structures while offering a different perspective. In this sense, it shares much with how memes function: they’re templates, vessels for recurring ideas.

The core of my commentary has always been rooted in the impulse to say the obvious thing nobody else seems to be saying—the “emperor has no clothes” moment. There’s a certain humour and tension in stating the plainly visible, and that play between performance, reality, and critique carries through from freeze_magazine into Crit Club.

Crit Club is a performance that urges its participants to role-play by taking part in a debate centering around a question that is specifically unrealistic or impossible-to-answer. Why did you choose to have your participants take up viewpoints that they might not agree with as opposed to hosting a debate wherein participants argue a viewpoint they actually agree with or already personally hold?

First, I think it’s important to acknowledge that public forums—including the art world—are already performative spaces. The idea behind Crit Club is to turn up the volume on that performativity, to make it visible and theatrical. It’s also a way to reflect on broader political dynamics, where public figures often defend positions without necessarily believing in them. That contradiction doesn’t get discussed enough, and I wanted to stage it, to exaggerate it, to make it part of the artwork.

Giving participants a viewpoint they may not agree with also offers a kind of freedom—freedom to experiment, to role-play, to understand mechanisms of argumentation from the inside. The switch halfway through the debate, where participants have to argue from the opposite side, is crucial. It forces a perspectival shift, encouraging empathy and critical distance. These are important skills—not just for political dialogue, but also for how we engage online, where debates increasingly feel like traps designed not to reach consensus but to entrench division. People build their statements expecting to be disagreed with, designing their rhetoric around conflict. Crit Club tries to open that up.

At the beginning of your career, @freeze_magazine allowed you to create your own opportunities by combining niche relatability with intellectual insight on a digital platform hosting over a billion users. Now, it is difficult to find mentions of your name online that don’t immediately contextualise you with your instagram account. What is your relationship to @freeze_magazine now that you have evolved as an artist? 

When I started freeze_magazine, I didn’t feel the need to reveal who I was. The memes stood on their own, and that anonymity was quite liberating—it was humbling to see people engage with the work without knowing the person behind it. But as I began receiving invitations to exhibit or present work in physical spaces, it became necessary to distinguish between the meme account and myself. That separation has allowed me to explore other forms of expression—performances, lectures, workshops—without being bound to the meme format.

That said, I don’t see freeze_magazine as something I’ve grown out of. It’s more like a root system that continues to nourish other parts of my practice. I hope that, over time, people will associate me just as much with these new projects as they do with freeze_magazine.

Over the past five years you’ve participated in a number of both solo and group exhibitions, in which you describe your pieces largely taking form as ‘physical echoes of a digital phenomenon’. Given that internet memes are predicated on appropriation, alteration, and articulation, how would you categorise the artworks in which you situate digital memes in physical environments?

I see my work occupying a liminal space between the digital and the physical, using both dimensions simultaneously. I’m not interested in the binary of one versus the other. What I find compelling is how they can be brought together to create hybrid forms—installations, experiences, performances—that are informed by both.

In terms of categorisation, I’m deliberately resistant. I prefer creating works that don’t fall neatly into any one category. For example, you could describe freeze_magazine as a durational performance, where each meme is an artwork; or as a participatory performance, a form of social commentary, or even as an online exhibition. Similarly, Crit Club started as a performance and also takes on the qualities of a podcast, a game, a debate show.

Rather than define these forms rigidly, I’m more interested in how they blur boundaries. I leave it up to others to categorise what I do. I think part of the challenge with digital art is that our existing vocabulary isn’t always adequate—and that’s something worth pushing against.

When Crit Club comes to IMPAKT, the exhibition hall will be modelled after a sports arena to fashion the debate as a good-natured competition between well-matched athletes. In what ways do you think making, sharing, and consuming memes can be construed as a sport? 

There’s a shared tension between memes and sports in how they both circulate widely and invite participation. Both are accessible formats—they’re not bound by specialist knowledge, and they offer space for interpretation, misinterpretation, and remixing. There’s a speed and immediacy to both, a sense of collective engagement, of spectatorship and competition.

I’m not entirely convinced that memes are a sport, but they definitely share qualities that the art world often lacks—humour, relatability, openness to broader audiences. That’s part of what drew me to both memes and the sports arena as a model for Crit Club: they destabilise traditional hierarchies and allow for a more playful, populist kind of criticality.

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.