The African Desperate

In Soliloquy , part of the Kita’s World series, Martine Syms creates digital avatar Kita, who acts as cultural commentator, speaking to questions of consciousness within the systems of race, capitalism, and technology.

Incense, Sweaters, and Ice is a new feature film inspired by the idea that anything one does while being watched is a performance. The film follows three protagonists—Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”)—as they navigate the dramas of surveillance, moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. How does the ever present potential image affect the way we act and the way we see ourselves? By examining how cinema now happens in real time, Syms works between the documented and the live to find the lie.

At a weeklong camp for teenage girls, a counselor leads the campers through a series of exercises that blend the language of female empowerment and body positivity with the kind of radical transparency that makes for good reality TV. The exercises culminate in a bizarre group confessional.

Martine Syms blends recreations with home movies from the life of Brent David Freaney, a lifelong pop girlie who was once, as vintage camcorder footage reveals, a Deep South teenager obsessed with outspoken The Real World: New Orleans castmate Melissa Howard. RW-LO is a nostalgic—and surprising—inquiry into what happens when people start being celebrities, and they stop being real.

Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles. - Video Data Bank

In this endless, silent loop, Martine Syms is seen in three-quarter profile against a plain black background. Framed from the chest up, wearing a brown t-shirt and with braided hair, the artist can be seen covered in milk. We see how it has poured down Syms’s face, hairline, braids, and torso. Its thick residue covering her clothes and skin. In the time it takes to draw breath and blink, the scene is looped, the only other sign of movement are the drips from her chin that fall and then repeat in a cycle that seemingly defies gravity. This powerful, almost still image reminds us that milk is often used by protestors to relieve the painful effects of tear gas.

Over a four-year period, Martine Syms gathered 180 video clips—each 30 seconds long—from sources such as YouTube, talk shows, Vine, and her own personal video diaries. They focus largely on media images and everyday gestures of Blackness that circulate across the electronic devices that shape contemporary life, with each clip functioning as a canto or stanza in Lessons I-CLXXX. The clips echo the format of short advertisements, and suggest that the private moments of one individual are inscribed within a larger collective and commercial culture. They are woven together and sequenced randomly to create an open-ended poetic collage inspired by and participating in the Black radical tradition. Syms’s earliest lessons draw on the poet Kevin Young’s encyclopedic work of literary and cultural criticism, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), in which the traditions, or “lessons,” of Black life are understood as the center of American culture.

My Only Idol is Reality is a video work created from an excerpt of Season One of MTV’s The Real World. The piece uses repetition as a framework for abstraction.