Memes of Marta Frej as Critical-Identity Project

Abstract

Memes and memetisation of reality are theoretically relatively new phenomena, practically — mem’s aesthetics and idioms, although previously unnamed, are nothings new in visual arts. Undoubtedly however, as a medium, that uses the Internet most willingly, in their in mass and engaging in various aspects of everyday life as „a contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behaviour, causing them to propagate the pattern” [Grant: 2005*], deserves closer scrutiny as in the context of identity practices, as well as, in widely understood, critical projects. On the example of Marta Frej’s memes, an attempt will be made to study their axiological analysis and/or interpretation (we ask for the presence — or lack thereof - of the values that these verbal collage images convey to each other - who, what and how is invoked and visualized) — in the context of identity practices. Secondly, we will look at memes in the context of critical-artistic practices. The question to which I would ultimately like to find an answer, is a question about the conciliation character of (selected) memes in a double dimension: whether and how they may unite contemporary receivers as present (re) presentations of the surrounding world and whether and how they’re refer to icono- and logosphere of collective and/or social memory, which is constantly by they (re) actualisated.