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