Registration: welcome@gfzk.de
Johanna Maj Schmidt is an artist and social scientist. In this workshop, Schmidt explains what memes are and how the extreme right uses memes, for example to spread anti-feminist content. Participants will interpret selected memes together. Schmidt will also present the results of her research project.
Johanna Maj Schmidt studied political science in Bremen and art and politics at Goldsmiths University in London. In 2022 she graduated with Clemens von Wedemeyer (class expanded cinema) at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In her artistic practice, she combines film, performance and painting to investigate the influence of online spheres on social coexistence. Schmidt works at the Else-Frenkel-Brunswick Institute for Democracy Research in Leipzig and is doing her doctorate in the research group “Rechtspopulismus – Autoritäre Entwicklungen, extrem-rechte Diskurse und demokratische Resonanzen” [Right-wing populism – authoritarian developments, extreme-right discourses and democratic resonances] at the Universities of Cologne and Leipzig on the question of how the heroic is expressed in right-wing internet memes. In We Must Be Mistaken, a video installation currently in view at the exhibition Something between us, Johanna Maj Schmidt portrays two social groups whose worlds could not be more different. On the one hand she shows a group of feminists discussing equality and self-determination, and on the other so-called incels (involuntary celibates), who spread misogynistic memes on the internet to defend their idea of masculinity.