Claudia Rankine in conversation with Martine Syms
Monday 21 Oct 2024 from 7pm to 8:30pm
Free upon registration
Talk in english
An exceptional encounter between poet and essayist Claudia Rankine and Martine Syms about her exhibition 'Total'.
Claudia Rankine is the author of the essay "The Revolution Will Be Videotaped", published in the Martine Syms exhibition catalogue.
To mark the occasion, the Martine Syms and Mohamad Abdouni exhibitions will be open to the public from 6pm!
Using a combination of video, installation and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Martine Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions.
Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.
Syms has exhibited internationally with solo exhibition including Total, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024); Present Goo, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); Ugly Plymouths, Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nimes (2023); SHE MAD Sl:E4, MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2022); Grio College, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson (2022); She Mad: Season One, Bergen Kunsthall (2021); Neural Swamp, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2022).
Group exhibitions include Coming Soon, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024); After Laughter Comes Tears, MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum, Luxembourg (2023); Stranger in the Village, Racism in the Mirror by James Baldwin, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale, Copenhague (2023); Signals: How Video Transformed the World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023) et Mis/ Communication: Language and Power in Contemporary Art, SUNY Fredonia, New York (2023).
In 2022, Syms released her widely acclaimed feature-film, The African Desperate. Martine Syms has been recognised with numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023) ; United States Artists Fellowship (2020) and the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media (2020).
She has lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and MoMA PS1, among other venues.
Martine Syms obtained a MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (NY) (2017) and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL) (2007).
A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations.
Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).
Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts.