ART CITIES:London-Martine Syms

Martine Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humour and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sadie Coles HQ Archive

Martine Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities. The artist presents her first UK showing of her recent project “Ugly Plymouths” (2020). First presented in Los Angeles earlier this year, the immersive video installation comprises a one-act play shown across three screens – starring Hot Dog, Doobie, and Le Que Sabe. As the narrative progresses, the three characters talk and sing alongside and over each other, one receding as another moves into the foreground. On occasion their dialogue falls into a robotic unison, a kind of emotionless chorus – the voices define the distance between them more than the relation. They have trouble relating, despite their efforts at romance, and this troubled connection is the subject of their dialogue. In footage the characters are not visualized; only their surroundings, and surrounding thoughts, are. Videos pan across beach vacations, domestic scenes, music concerts and everyday life in motion. The video takes as its establishing environment the Los Angeles described in Bob Kaufman’s poem “Hollywood”: in this Los Angeles, the city is sick without leave. Actors, artists, pimps, salesclerks and poets are selling delusions whole-heartedly, where there is always a catch and never a foundation.

Martine Syms obtained an MFA from Bard College in 2017 and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. During her BFA, Syms coined the term “conceptual entrepreneur” to characterise her practice. The artist’s 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. Her research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.

Info: Sadie Coles HQ off site, 24 Cork St, Mayfair, London, Duration: 6-31/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com