Art Young Artists 2018

Martine Syms Resets the Traditional Bounds of Identity

Martine Syms photographed in 2018 near her Los Angeles home.
Martine Syms photographed in 2018 near her Los Angeles home.

Martine Syms is perhaps best known for her interventions into new media that have profoundly changed the nature of the art-historical landscape. What is equally important is Syms’ role as a researcher and writer, as someone who brings the past, with all its complexities and paradoxes, into the present. Her Incense Sweaters & Ice, from 2017, for instance, is a simultaneously epic and intimate story that explores the contemporary resonances of the Great Migration. Syms takes this historical framework and adds complex layers of desire that show the impossibility of any unidirectional interpretation of the past. Syms says of the film, “In this case, I was curious about the relationship between cinema, Black women and movement. History bleeds out of everything.”

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