Memeplex Invades Your Cerebral Cortex

‘Engineered’ by the artists Joey Holder and Omsk Social Club (OSC), the group exhibition ‘Memeplex™’ at Seventeen presents itself as a chichi, creepily Squid Game-hued ‘neuro-ops’ clinic, decked out with what might be therapeutic paraphernalia or contemporary artworks, or perhaps both. In a form of Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP) game, we’re invited to don headphones and navigate the show while listening to a lulling narrative, told in the second person. The voice tells us that we’re disoriented patients who’ve just woken up from a medical procedure, before breaking into a husky rendition of Bobby McFerrin’s 1988 acapella track Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Thus reassured, we’re talked through our surroundings, including a pair of works by Holder and OSC, both titled Memeplex™ (2021). In a sea punk turquoise ‘operating theatre’, a hospital bed is flanked by gleaming kidney dishes filled with vaguely fecal-looking seed pods, while in the neighbouring blush-coloured ‘recovery room’, a divan is spread with a crochet blanket and a Suzanne Treister-designed tarot deck. Our orientation complete, we’re informed that a number of memes have been transplanted into our cerebral cortex. Moreover, these ‘self-replicating’ cultural entities, which range politically from ‘Left to Right’, actually ‘live off the human brain’. When an ‘alpha meme’ inevitably emerges, it will typically have dominion over ‘80 percent of the mental strength of its host’.