Martine Syms

Her first survey in France, this show conflates the spaces of the museum, the store, and the artist’s personal studio — a bridge between public and private, seen and unseen, interior and exterior. With early works alongside newly produced objects and editions available for sale, Total traces Syms’s long-standing interest in images and their affect on reality, how they impact the ways in which relationships form, and how they’re embedded in the construction of the self.

What if we were all performers in a movie that was constantly being produced? Total treats the contemporary condition of widespread monitoring and image capture as a system, with the continuous mise en scène of viewing and recording that stem from it.

Ultimately, Syms presents a kaleidoscopic experience where existential questions are encountered as artworks and transformed into slogans for buyable editions. Between intimate references, historical archives, cultural representations of blackness, feminist history and invocations of spirituality, Total becomes a form of expanded cinema that serves as a social space where rituals of identity are invented, performed, and watched. 

Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

Image credit: Martine Syms, Loser Back Home © Martine Syms. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles. Photo : Robert Wedemeyer.