Martine Syms
2021Incense, Sweaters, & Ice
Martine Syms
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.
Incense, Sweaters, & Ice
A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere
Martine Syms
A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere uses the premise of a pitch and the formula of Sitcom to deliver an essay on representation, self-presentation, viewership and embedded codes, as they exist on the American screen. All this, paced by commercial interruptions as Lessons, with the same stakes in hand.
A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere
Memory Palace
Martine Syms
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
Memory Palace
Lessons I— CLXXX
Martine Syms
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.
Lessons I— CLXXX
