Martine Syms

She Mad gathers materials and documentation on Martine Syms' seminal episodic project of the same name. Each episode of this series takes a different format, using various narrative formats, from sitcoms to TikTok videos, and includes filmed footage as well as research materials. Each episode revolves around a protagonist, also named Martine—an overachieving, stoner graphic designer who lives in Hollywood and wishes she were an important artist.

The first episode Pilot for a Show about Nowhere (2015) merges a semi-autobiographical account of Syms' own life as a young black woman with a video essay-like narrative on the history of commercial television and its assumed target audiences. The episode Laughing Gas (2016) draws on early cinema, specifically the 1907 silent film of the same name by Edwin Porter, one of the earliest examples of a black female actress, Bertha Regustus, performing an independent role on-screen. Intro to Threat Modeling (2017) is told through email exchanges, screengrabs, and an avatar, outlining the effects of surveillance on subjectivity. The episode Bitch Zone (2020) takes us to an empowerment programme for teenage girls founded by supermodel and business mogul Tyra Banks.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition She Mad – Season One at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA.

Martine Syms (born 1988 in Los Angeles) is an American interdisciplinary artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her works explore how mass media shapes and frames identities and cultures. Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of black identity and gender appear in the public imagination.

Edited by Axel Wieder.
Texts by Jadine Collingwood, William Pym, Axel Wieder.

Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist's book of writings by Martine Syms

A new artist's book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced "my thick being'), a "black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme" digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms' recent exhibitions. In Syms' installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer's communications with messages and animations.

In Shame Space, the character's autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot's SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

Published Dec 2020

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

After Laughter Comes Tears, in its exhibition and book forms, brings together artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative. This publication follows the structure of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, with a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, which each sample excerpts from the range of theory, fiction and poetry that inspired and substantiate the themes of the exhibition. Widening the spectrum of the traditional catalogue, each artist was given a "carte blanche"—an invitation to contribute to the book on their own terms.

This performative book was conceived as a story; a story of the pains, joys, anxieties and doubts of the 2020s. It takes as a starting point, the feelings of stasis and anger that define the present stage of late capitalism, framed by the anxieties of a generation facing a climate crisis, welfare states trampled and failed by neoliberal policies and the rise of xenophobia around the globe, partly fueled by fake news spreading on- and offline. It is an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists expressing the lurid shapes of the crises that surround us and form a (never exhaustive) part of our contemporary reality.

They are Cem A., Panteha Abareshi, Monira Al Qadiri, Kate Cooper, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jesse Darling, Stine Deja, Omer Fast, Anna Franceschini, Guan Xiao, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lukáš Hofmann, Christian Jankowski, Chris Korda, Ndayé Kouagou, Ghislaine Leung, Isaac Lythgoe, Taus Makhacheva, Diego Marcon, Jacopo Miliani, Marie Munk, Chalisée Naamani, Agnieszka Polska, PRICE, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Mika Rottenberg, Julika Rudelius, Dorian Sari, Sin Wai Kin, Shinuk Suh, Martine Syms, Mungo Thomson, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Artur Żmijewski.

Edited by Clarisse Fahrtmann, Clementine Proby, Joel Valabrega.
Foreword by Bettina Steinbrügge.

Contributions by Kate Cooper, Lukas Hofmann, David McDermott, Markus Pilgram, Agnieszka Polska, Clémentine Proby, Sin Wai Kin, Bettina Steinbrügge, Geraldine Tedder, Joel Valabrega, Lauren Wetmore.

The ‘Artists who Write and Writers who Art’ Issue. For Worms 7 we’ve looked to our visual counterparts for some soil nutrients. We’ve wormed our way into the psyche of the artist, to bring you the ‘Artists That Write, and Writers That Art’ issue. Many of our subjects in the past have come into writing via non-traditional routes (filmmaking, curation, art, performance, podcasting, and so on), so it only felt right to cast a spotlight over those who have inspired our experimental literary practices so far. Not only those that use words within their visual practice, but those who use images to inform their writing. The reader, the writer, the artist, the activist, the poet and performer; they’re all here and they’re all worms. 

In this mega worm (which is fittingly pink, for the first time somehow) you are in for a feast. Clem interview Helen Marten, Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily, Caitlin interviews actual art-writing icon Olivia Laing, Pierce talks to the profound Dr. Joy James, Philippa Snow gives us her thoughts on the act of writing art criticism (spoiler: it’s out her ass), and we have enough Derek Jarman content to keep you going for the rest of the year. We have some hilarious/insightful/weird/wonderful contributions from some of your favourite regulars too; including Jess Cole, Isabelle Bucklow, Sam Moore, Haydée Touitou, Estelle Hoy and many others.

(Note from the publisher)

FEATURING:

DIAMOND STINGILY, HELEN MARTEN, NICOLE RUDICK, NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, MARTINE SYMS, OLIVIA LAING, DR. JOY JAMES, JORDAN WEITZMAN, WU TSANG, DEREK JARMAN, SABINE MIRLESSE, MISHA HONCHARENKO, CHANTAL AKERMAN, JOANNA NOVAK, ANNIE ERNAUX, DAISY SANCHEZ, JENNA SUTELA, ANICKA YI, TUOMAS A. LAITINEN, STEPHANIE COMILANG & SIMON SPEISER, VALERIE SOLANAS

CONTRIBUTORS:

HAYDEÉ TOUITOU, L SCULLY & LUCAS RESTIVO, LEE RAE WALSH, JESS COLE, ESTELLE HOY, PHILIPPA SNOW, SAMANTHA ROSENWALD, ISABELLE BUCKLOW, MONA GLASSFIELD, CLEM MACLEOD, SARAH WHITE, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, PAVIELLE GARCIA, IONE SAIZAR, CHANTAL JOFFE, SOPHIE DAVIDSON, PIERCE ELDRIDGE, VIOLET CONROY, ELLE PÉREZ, PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, JACQUELINE ENNIS-COLE, MARY ADETURINMO, STEPH FRANCIS-SHANAHAN, SAM MOORE, BUG SHEPHERD-BARRON, DONNA MARCUS DUKE, SAM HOLTON BRADLEY, KITTY GRADY, FELIX PILGRIM, CICI PENG, HOLLY MILLS, THEA MCLACHLAN, ERICA GOULD, PAULA DUCAY AND INÉS GARCÍA, ELVIRA GARCIA, INÊS GERALDES CARDOSO, JODIE HILL, JEMIMA SKALA, MAURA SAPPILO, DELIA RAINEY

This volume surveys Paul Chan's publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the "breather," a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.

Chan's turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of "breather." Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the "breather" underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist's input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC).

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D'Souza and many others.

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises.

Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms.

Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

Publishing as Practice centers on the work of three contemporary artists/book publishers who have developed fresh ways of broaching the political in publishing. 

This book documents a residency program at Ulises—a curatorial platform based in Philadelphia—that explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice. Over the course of two years, three participants (Hardworking Goodlooking, Martine Syms/Dominica, and Bidoun) activated Ulises as an exhibition space and public programming hub, engaging the public through workshops, discussions, and projects. 

Hardworking Goodlooking is a design and publishing imprint working primarily out of the Philippines. Dominica is an imprint run by artist Martine Syms dedicated to exploring Blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. Bidoun, a non-profit organization and magazine, focuses on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas. Each organization approached their residency at Ulises in a unique way, bringing a new understanding of what it means to practice publishing. 

Edited by Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, and Ricky Yanas, Publishing as Practice features a preface by David Senior, Head of Library and Archives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Ulises Carrión’s 1975 publishing manifesto “The New Art of Making Books.” Publishing as Practice also includes writing from Clara Balaguer, Hardworking Goodlooking, Martine Syms/Dominica, Bidoun, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, and Gee Wesley alongside interviews, excerpts, and documentation from each residency. 

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presented the experimental exhibition Colored People Time. Divided into three chapters—Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents—it used the Black vernacular phrase Colored People's Time (CPT) to explore the ways that dominant notions of time have been used to control and condemn Black people. CPT names a political performance by Black people to evade and ridicule the enforcement of punctuality and productivity.

Alongside reproductions of historical objects from the Black Panther Party, Sutton E. Griggs, the National Institutes of Health/Getty Images, and the African Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Colored People Time includes reprints of seminal essays, newly commissioned writing and poetry from Huey Copeland, Eve Ewing, Michael Hanchard, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Amber Rose Johnson, Carolyn Lazard, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Meg Onli, Gregory Pardlo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Monique Scott, Martine Syms and Michelle M. Wright. Artists include: Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Carolyn Lazard, Dave McKenzie, Cameron Rowland, Sable Elyse Smith and Martine Syms.