Social Media and the Cultural Institution

Drawing on a year of experience working with Ibraaz on developing its social-media strategy, I consider in this essay how a cultural institution might operate critically within the platforms that it relies on for expanding its online presence. I return to themes raised in the inaugural Mission Gathering session on Online / Offline Forms of Dissemination and to questions posed across Ibraaz’s broader public programme, especially Jaya Klara Brekke’s series on Technology & Power.

As an institution whose curatorial remit is to question the forms of power shaping artistic production, exhibition, and reception, we should extend that scrutiny to the digital platforms we use. At the aforementioned inaugural Mission Gathering session, panellists Muhannad Al Hariri, Günseli Yalçinkaya, and Al Hassan Elwan (aka PostPostPost) were asked by moderator Shumon Basar to consider how posting practices have shifted since 7 October 2023, where social media sits in relation to legacy media and the wider culture-as-media industrial complex, and how a cultural institution might choreograph the interface between the building and the screen as an experimental case study in itself.

Almost a year on from the opening of Ibraaz, that list of questions can be extended: what can we do to bridge short-form, Instagram-optimised media and the longer-form work that Ibraaz Publishing commissions? Is virality even a good thing? And should we adopt the languages and aesthetics of social-media platforms in order to achieve it or to subvert them from within?

We can look for some possible answers to these questions in how artists working with social media and network cultures hold up mirrors to platform logics, as well as in less public and more hybrid or in-person forms of participation.

Instagram is currently Ibraaz’s primary platform, reaching a growing international audience with information about events, exhibitions, and new content on Publishing. We chose to use Bluesky over X owing to the rise in hate speech following Elon Musk's takeover in 2023, yet we still depend on Meta-owned Instagram for events and publishing and have noticed occasional lower reach on posts mentioning Gaza, genocide, or Palestine.1 This mirrors documented, systemic suppression of pro-Palestinian content on Meta platforms, tracked by 7amleh, an organisation that defends digital rights for Palestinians, and researcher Fabio Cristiano since before October 2023.2

Further down the line, we can imagine approaches that subvert infrastructure largely governed by a handful of tech oligarchs, starting with how artists already appropriate the native languages of these platforms to expose the relationship between culture, power, and technology.

One artist who works with these themes is London-based Zein Majali. Majali combines video, sound, and live performance to interrogate the acceleration of online content and the spiritual crises it provokes. Scored with original music, her performance work Doomscroll (2023–24) sampled Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and archived internet material familiar to those who are chronically online. Through collecting, dissecting, and recontextualising this material, Majali exposes the absurdity of the content-production machine and its relationship to geopolitics and popular culture, hyperbolically mimicking the feed’s frenetic mix of ragebait, scandal, template trends, and AI-generated ‘digital Dada’, morphing the doomscroll from an individual act into a collective one.3

Our in-house output as an institution shouldn’t necessarily replicate these experimental forms of content subversion, but a close understanding of the ways in which artists are working both within and against the platforms we use and a grasp of internet-native meme cultures can inform our own approach to our own social-media presence. This, in turn, challenges the processes of flattening and homogenisation that the marketing languages of platforms such as Instagram push creative output towards. Artists become creators; artwork becomes content. Media is truncated, accelerated, compressed into thirty-second reels to increase chances of gaining algorithmic traction. 

The platforms themselves also give rise to distinctive modes of production, such as those explored in Dubai-based artist and curator Dana Dawud’s touring internet-cinema programme, Open Secret, which experiments with the formal restrictions of internet-native content and the collaborative tendencies of network culture as a way of engaging critically with the platforms we use. The works in the screenings, including Dawud’s own work Monad (2024) andPoorspigga’s Please Don’t Skip (2023), emerge not just as aesthetic representations of the technologies and platforms that facilitate our online lives, but as archival works produced within the internet as milieu. As an institution, we can consider what might emerge if we developed a similar programme of micro-commissions that invited artists and filmmakers to subvert the logics, aesthetics, and vernaculars of online life and ‘content’ from the inside.

The ultimate aim of flattening visual media into algorithmically successful content is virality: the exponential spread of content to ever-wider audiences. Virality is desirable in theory, especially for an institution in its early years – who doesn’t want visibility and boosted engagement metrics? Art critic Ben Davis calls this desire for virality ‘Quantitative Aesthetics’ – the valuing of art by data points rather than judgement – which he ties to capitalism’s built-in demand for constant growth.4 Research into the psychology of virality further elucidates how this valuation of culture by metrics operates in reality, particularly on social-media platforms: what tends to gain traction is what triggers high-arousal reactions such as outrage and shock.5

Engineering extreme emotional responses by optimising media for the algorithm to boost engagement is intrinsic to the way the platforms themselves work, reducing value judgement to a constant growth of metrics provoked by controversial or manipulative content. This isn’t an argument against virality itself, but a caution that views and likes don’t always translate into lasting, meaningful, or real-life engagement. How might we instead utilise these platforms to direct audiences towards forms of participation that exist beyond public, online spaces?

Since the COVID pandemic, there has been a rise in online communities built on group chat-supporting spaces like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal. In media, cultural theory and art spaces, New Models, Do Not Research, and Real Review host members-only channels where audiences participate, exchange resources, and discuss relevant topics, leading to collaboratively published material and the organisation of in-person events. Inviting our audience into these ‘dark forest’ spaces – private, semi-hidden spaces where discourse can unfold – could cultivate valuable participation around our wider programming and an environment more conducive to engaging with material on Ibraaz Publishing.6Moderated by a core team at Ibraaz, this community could support hybrid reading groups, online screenings, and in-person salons built around current curatorial themes. Hybridity, in this context, reflects back to a closing comment from Mission Gathering respondent Mona Chalabi in which she stated the need to design our offline and online spaces with accessibility at their core.

Beyond the basic requirements of an institution that hosts live events and publishes literary and audio-visual work, there is room to expand what a social-media strategy could look like. Just as Ibraaz’s architectural design and curatorial programme evolve incrementally through feedback from stakeholders, visitors, artists, and the wider team, the structures underpinning our communications and social-media outreach should evolve in a similar way.