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Martine Syms Selected Exhibitions and Works

Projects 106 Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY), USA

27 May – 16 July 2017

Projects 106: Martine Syms, the first US solo museum exhibition by Martine Syms, is an immersive installation including photographs and staged objects, and centring around a new feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice.

Shot on location in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Clarksdale, Mississippi, Incense, Sweaters, and Ice follows three protagonists - Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”) - as they navigate dramas of surveillance, moving between watching, being watched, and remaining unseen. Accompanying the film is a suite of photographs sized to standard American movie posters and a metal mesh structure inspired by the geographies of the Great Migration.

Using video and performance, Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to narrative, vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions.

Sweaters, Incense, and Ice 2017 video 75 mins HQ21-MS13257

link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017 Incense, Sweaters, and Ice follows three protagonists, Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”). Through Hollywood film tropes as well as the visual language of social media video platforms like Vine and Instagram, Syms follows in a long cinematic history of using camera motion to create the illusion of subjectivity. Intertwining technique and narrative, the video drives at the tension between surveillance and self-promotion that pervades our many avenues of self-documentation and broadcast. Shot in locations that reflect the route of the Great Migration (Los Angeles, Chicago, and Clarksdale, Miss.), the video employs dist inct camera techniques to foreground the camera itself as a central character.

Each scene marks a shift of viewpoint in relationship to the action, illustrating the impossibility for the camera’s gaze to be neutral. We watch as Girl gets ready, waits, kills time, and flirts. In each instance, the camera switches personas and performs a different role: as the boyfriend, the audience, the surveillance camera, the documentary maker, the director. The camera is recast again as Girl relaxes reading in the apartment. A wide, fixed frame transports us to the family dinner and surveils her hotel room as she gets ready. Text messages periodically disrupt the onscreen action to reveal her digital interactions with another screen, her smartphone.

Sweaters, Incense, and Ice, 2017 [film stills]

AT THIS STAGE (group exhibition) Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (LA), USA

10 June – 12 August 2017

Some what? 2016 window vinyl dimensions variable Martine Syms’ work is expressed in what she describes as her ‘native tongue’: the languages of pop culture and advertising. Some what? is the second occasion Syms has pasted this graphic in a space that is visible to passers-by, within a frame where one expects to encounter a revolving series of images intended to market products. Its first appearance was on a billboard in Chicago and now in a ‘storefront’ on a major arterial of Los Angeles.

The artist works with images that offer familiarity but lack an obvious specificity. The source of the image is guarded, as Syms is not interested in reference but in the production of a feeling. Her work matches the experience one encounters in Los Angeles with frequency: “moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you’ve been somewhere or you know something when you really don’t.”

Exhibition of 21 Artists Shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 (group exhibition)

Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine 25 February – 16 April 2017

Lessons XXXI-LX 2016 video 15 mins link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017 Lessons is an ongoing project consisting of a series of 30-second commercials that merges found footage from TV shows, advertisements, sitcoms and online material with personal archives and original footage to combine into an extended, incomplete poem about the black radical tradition and politics of identity. By mixing the sources of the images used, Martine Syms plays with the public perception and how it is manipulated by different streams of information and forms of representation in popular culture.

The Easy Demands CONDO: Bridget Donahue hosted by Sadie Coles HQ, London

14 January – 11 February 2017

Dear T,

You can’t worry about a car that isn’t there, right?

That’s a metaphor of some kind. I’ll let you figure it out. It’s impossible for me to write these days. I’m angry and I’m frustrated and I’m incredibly depressed. It’s wild that we have to fight to be treated like people. What do you think it would take?

A few weeks ago I followed a link titled What if Black Women Were Free hoping to find some answers. (Now that’s my kind of clickbait.) One quote, from Naava Smolash: “Speaking, simple naming is incredibly hard. The gap between word and lived reality can make people feel crazy; talking together can help clarify reality, to get it back.”

When I was in New Zealand I went to the book launch for No Pride in Prisons’ Abolitionist Demands. It’s structured around short-term, intermediate, and long-term actions. Some of them will take an enormous effort and many never happen. Others are simple and relatively easy to implement. They called these the easy demands.

I can relate to this way of operating. I told Sophia that there are no good or bad decisions because any action creates change. You might look back and say ‘what the fuck what I was thinking?’. ThatÊs fine. That’s life. What are my easy demands?

I’m still speaking when I can even though everything I do feels like nothing. What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth? (I think Audre Lorde wrote that.) I just hope no one describes my work as “powerful.”

Love you,

M

Lesson LXXV 2017 video, inset in MDF pedestal mount 30 secs 55.88 x 127.00 x 74.30 cm / 22 x 50 x 29 ¼ inches

Borrowed Lady Audain Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia

13 October – 10 December 2016

Martine Syms works with images and texts from personal and popular archives, as well as with apparatuses of image production. Her videos, performances, publications and installations examine how private and public identity is constructed from famil ial, cultural and historical inheritances. The montage, collage and quotation strategies she uses are borrowed from the structures of early cinema, sitcom television, commercials, GIFs and Vines.

Borrowed Lady presents an expanded installation of Syms' 2015 video Notes on Gesture. Taking a cue from writer Samuel R. Delany's reflections on how feminine characters are constructed through the compositing of ideal physiological and psychological features, Syms draws from her archives to speculate on the influences on her actor's gestures.

Syms own practice is also formed of conceptual and critical inheritances. Alongside Delaney, Borrowed Lady is also informed by seventeenth century physician John Bulwer's study of hand gestures and their meaning; philosopher Giorgio Agamben's impressions on cinema's recuperation of the politics of gesture; and scholar Alison Landsberg’s formulation of mass popular medias as "prosthetic" memory.

Notes on Gesture 2015 four-channel video 10 mins 27 secs link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017 Hands speak the same language everywhere: this is the premise of the 17th-century treatise, Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand, which is a touchstone for Martine Syms’s Notes on Gesture. Only they don’t, really: hands have their own dialects, their own vernacular. In this ten-minute film, composed of jerkily looping memes, Syms and her collaborator, Diamond Stingily, catalogue a specific, immediately recognizable, vocabulary of braid-flicks, pouts and dance moves that pertain to African-American women: ‘famous women, infamous women and unknown women’, as the artist says. Tweaking a famous quip by US comedian Paul Mooney, the sentiment underpinning Notes on Gesture is: “Everyone wanna be a black woman but no-one wanna be a black woman.’ Meaning: everybody wants to shake it like Beyoncé, but who wants to be amongst the 25 percent of black women in the US living in poverty? Note on Gesture shares Mooney’s taut should-welaugh/ shouldn’t-we-laugh humour at a moment in which the symbolism of black hands — raised in a Black Power salute or in the air on police request — has rarely been more charged.

Notes on Gesture, 2015 [film stills]

Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only (group exhibition) Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA), USA

12 June – 28 August 2016

Laughing Gas 2016 four-channel video 6 mins 59 secs link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017 Martine Syms draws on early cinema history and the language of television for Laughing Gas, the pilot episode of a situation comedy titled She Mad. This television series is part of an ongoing conceptual project that Syms initiated in 2015 with the work Pilot for a Show about Nowhere, which in its early stages took the form of an installation of documents, images, and research materials filtered through a semiautobiographical account of Syms’s life as a young black woman trying to “make it” as an artist in Los Angeles. The research for this project and a large part of Syms’s work to date is part of an investigation of the formation of black subjectivities on both sides of American television production. Syms addresses not only on-screen representation but the assumed target audiences within American television history. Early programs were responsible for giving, in Syms’s words, “visibility to a private black sphere.”

Syms’s Laughing Gas uses Edwin Porter’s 1907 silent film of the same title as a starting point for constructing a history of representation that extends into the present. Referring to a variety of visual forms and styles that reflect the evolution of cinematic tendencies into recent forms such as television, the Internet, and “ambient” footage produced by surveillance and body cams, Laughing Gas addresses the ways in which subjects and subjectivities have developed within and throughout the history of moving images. Porter’s nine-minute silent film featured Bertha Regustus, an African American actress whose character’s infectious laughter, triggered by the administration of nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office, affects everyone she encounters over the course of a single day. Notably, the film was one of the earliest examples of a black female actress performing an independent role on-screen, occupying an ostensibly independent position amid a context that would ordinarily feature white actors in blackface. By approximating the premise laid out by Porter’s film and casting herself in the role of “Martine” in a series of largely improvised scenes, Syms positions her own identity alongside those of contemporary viewers in relation to a history of cinema that otherwise presumed universal stories for a seemingly universal subject.

Laughing Gas, 2016 [film stills]

Fact & Trouble Institute of Contemporary Art, London

20 April – 19 June 2016

Fact & Trouble is an exhibition by American artist Martine Syms that examines the space between lived experience and its representation. Syms’s video series Lessons (ongoing), on view at the ICA, is a long, incomplete poem in 180 sections. Each piece is thirty seconds in duration and articulates a lesson from the tradition.

One of these lessons is painted on the gallery walls. The videos use the idea of inheritance as a departure point, simulating the private-public unconscious of television shows, advertisements, animated GIFs, police cams, surveillance footage, Vines and other digitally-circulated formats. In the alcove, this abundance of signifiers manifests in an immersive floor-to-ceiling collage.

To accompany and expand upon the videos, Syms has created an installation of double-sided photographs and cookies mounted on century stands, a standard workhorse of film production. The exhibition compiles original and found photography, alongside images taken by her father, weaving together familial, cultural, and historical legacies. Fact & Trouble demonstrates Syms’s multifarious artistic practice which includes video, performance and writing as well as publishing through her imprint Dominica.

Lessons I-XXX 2014 video 15 mins 1 sec link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017

COM PORT MENT Karma International, Beverly Hills (CA), USA

9 March – 23 April 2016

1. What does Martine Syms want? We discuss this obliquely one Monday morning in her studio, where the posters for COM PORT MENT have just been delivered by UPS. “They don’t look like shit,” she says approvingly. We’re both a bit distracted but arrive together to this question in our usual circuitous ways— via talk of “originality,” our distaste for the ritual of airports, Kevin Young’s “trooth,” found footage filmmaking, a particular YouTube phenomenon that will not be named, unreliable narrators, the anxiety of being duped. What doesn’t Martine Syms want? Martine doesn’t want to be known, and yet most weeks recently she has given talks that verge on the autobiographical. Martine doesn’t want to have to move her studio again, but the landlord is doubling their rent. Martine wants people to stop asking her what she thinks of living in Los Angeles. We have known each other since she was nineteen and I was twenty, and together we have been trying to figure out our respective questions-of-want ever since. Right now we’re solving using the elimination method. 2. Researching the cucoloris might bring you to a rather charming footnote by Barry Braverman on page 261 of his published guide to storytelling techniques: “Kooks, cukes, coo-koos, and cookies are industry jargon for a cookaloris, named, I think, after a gaffer named Mr. Cookaloris in the 1930s. I’m not sure about this. And his family isn’t talking.” Appropriately, a tool used by grips and cinematographers to manipulate light and shadows for dramatic effect possesses its own refracted origin story. “I think…I’m not sure…And his family isn’t talking.” Cucoloris-like sculptures along with a wall painting (LIFE IS BETTER WHEN I’M CRUEL) and a number of posters (all 22×28”, a standard size for movie posters) comprise the three formal elements of COM PORT MENT. I always appreciate an allegiance to the Rule of Threes. 3. For Spectacle, a journal included in Gwen Allen’s survey of Los Angeles artists’ magazines, the authors of the first issue’s editorial statement wrote, “Los Angeles is hard to know. It looks familiar: It’s a town we all grew up in, right there on the television set. […] If it is true that everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation, then Los Angeles is the site of that process.” The editors of Spectacle wrote this over thirty years ago, but I had an immediate flash of recognition. I thought of having eavesdropped on the other audience members in Martine’s Black Box at Human Resources - a recent exhibition intended as a sort of companion to COM PORT MENT - audibly debating amongst themselves the intentionality, authorship, and subjects of the array of sixty projected video lessons. I thought of all her other work: the semi-autobiographical performative lectures, the gleaning of images and news articles and Google searches, the ongoing conceptual devotion to the sit-com, the looping gestures that invoke an endless stream of Vine clips and reaction GIFs as much as they do Giorgio Agamben. Is this not exactly the realm where Martine’s work lives: in between that which is lived directly and that which is represented? I copied and pasted the quote into an email to Martine and clicked “Send.”

Vertical Elevated Oblique Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York (NY), USA

17 September – 1 November 2015

Triennial: Surround Audience (group exhibition) New Museum, New York (NY), USA

125 February – 24 May 2015

A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere 2015 two-channel video 25 mins link: http://www.sadiecoles.com/artists/martine-syms/martine-syms-film-2017.html username: Martine Syms password: Syms2017 A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere is a two-channel video that examines the politics of television viewership, incorporating footage from a number of sources to create a plurivocal narrative.

It is a sitcom pilot, but does not resemble a conventional episode. Black sitcoms are central in their potential to undermine television conventions and spark unpredictable and radical impulses, but also in their role in the erasure of the struggles and realities of poor Black populations. Filmed re-enactments of the artist’s life ground A Pilot For a Show About Nowhere in her experience, and a She Mad title card suggests a complete narrative.

A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere, 2015 [film stills]