Zentrum für Kritik und Memes

Zentrum für Kritik und Memes, 2024

Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe

From mid-July 2024 onwards, the artist Cem A. staged an intervention based on the German name of the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe [in English: Center for Art and Media], turning its acronym ZKM into a meme template. Visible in places around the building as well as in various online spaces, a series of speculative names for the institution started appearing. They range from the critical “Zentrum für Kulturkürzungen und Mehrarbeit” [Center for Cultural Cuts and Overtime] to the whimsical “Zentrum für Kuriositäten und Mückenstiche” [Center for Curiosities and Mosquito Bites] and the nonsensical “Zentrum für Kuddel und Muddel” [Center for Hodge and Podge]. These name variations mark the first chapter of the project Zentrum für Kritik und Memes [Center for Critique and Memes], which in its second chapter also features an installation in the foyer of ZKM.

Cem A.’s work is an extension of his online presence as @freeze_magazine, a popular meme account on Instagram which satirizes the art world with a hyper-reflexive and self-deprecating lens. The memes explore to- pics such as precarious labor, art-speak, elitism, and artist-curator relationships. He materializes these memetic strategies into interventions, sculptures, and installations—always informed by the networked nature of the internet.

As digital objects, memes are shared and re-shared online by many users. Appropriation is the essence of any meme practice: picking up something existing, giving it a spin, and watching how its meanings evolve through subsequent alterations. Memes can be unhinged, but also get to the heart of the matter and offer criticism or commentary in a way that is bizarre and insane—which is precisely what makes us laugh and, in some cases, makes us reflect on what is going on in the world and where we are heading. Far beyond funny cat videos, memes can be contested spaces where ideological struggles are hashed out across the political spectrum. As rhizomatic networks, memes have no central node or seminal root; they refuse any kind of solid state or definite framing. With Zentrum für Kritik und Memes, Cem A. fictionalizes the concept of an institution—like artists Marcel Broodthaers and Claes Oldenburg, or curator Harald Szeemann— turning it into a memetic spectacle of dynamic meaning-making.

Cem A.’s artistic meme practice delves into what it means to be a center for arts and media if, today, everything is media and everyone is a medium. Over the past years, media art has moved out of its niche position in the field of contemporary art as the role of technology became more and more prominent in society and popular discourses. Zentrum für Kritik und Memes experiments with internet logic in an institutional context. The “parasitic” intervention builds on a role-playing strategy, constantly taking up different names and identities as a means for exploring the constructions of future imaginaries.