ART-PRESENTATION: Martine Syms
Martine Syms uses video and performance to examine representations of blackness and its relationship to narrative, black vernacular, feminist movements, and radical traditions. She works in publishing, video, and performance. In 2007, she coined “conceptual entrepreneur” as her area of practice. Though presently ambivalent to framing her activity by capitalist terms, her self-identified title sustains one of her main ideas: self-determination through a sustainable institution, which stems from her interest in independent music and black-owned businesses.
By Dimitris Lempesi
Photo: MoMA Archive
“Projects 106: Martine Syms” is the first solo museum exhibition in the U.S.A. of the work of Martine Syms. The exhibition features an immersive installation centering on the full length film, ”Incense, Sweaters, and Ice” (2017). The exhibition is designed to resemble an image production set. Continuous swathes of purple reference the chroma-keyed environments used by visual effects studios to composite images for motion pictures, news broadcasts, or video games. At the center of the space, the film appears on three large screens arranged in a triangular configuration, with the image migrating from screen to screen as new scenes unfold, designed to keep viewers moving in space and following the artist’s cues. Shot on location ”Incense, Sweaters, and Ice” (2017), travels from Mississippi to Los Angeles by way of St. Louis, reflecting the legacies of the Great Migration. The narrative follows three protagonists: Girl, her great-aunt Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, and her new acquaintance WB (“whiteboy”), as they move between watching, being watched, and remaining unseen. Accompanying the film is a suite of prints that superimpose photographic stills from Incense, Sweaters, and Ice onto found American movie posters. An artist-designed augmented reality (AR) app planned in conjunction with the exhibition and allow sviewers to unlock additional content from the film’s narrative through the posters, creating an exchange between audience and artist, still and moving images, and screens both public and private. Using original and found content, Syms shows how identity production and image production are intertwined activities in contemporary life, particularly due to the public’s constant interaction with and appropriation of mass culture for personal social media. In crafting this personal narrative, it is now common to incorporate images that are only experienced through the mediating lens of mass culture. Using this as a departure point, Syms’s film explores a shared cultural inheritance of television shows, advertisements, police cameras, Vines, and original photography to create a dynamic collage about familial, cultural, and historical legacy.
Info: Organizer: Jocelyn Miller, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration: 27/5-16/7/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-17:30, Fri 10:30-22:00, www.moma.org
