Martine Syms’ art is known for its boundlessness : her subjects cross media – print and web distribution, photography, moving image, establishment, AI, programming – dissolving the lines between these structures. One of the most vivid and significant artists to show how advanced media shapes our way of life, Martine Syms draws on individual stories, oral histories, and social references to make mesmerizing fictions that make one think about contemporary life and subjectivity.
Through “Grio College,” Martine Syms presents a wide selection of works through November 27, 2022 at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York, USA, highlighting major new and ongoing works. The “Grio College” exhibition includes notable installations for movement and femininity Borrowed Lady (2016), which was purchased by the Marieluise Hessel Collection, as well as ongoing installations Ugly Plymouths create in 2020, a one-act play on three screens, and DED, an animation that follows a symbol of the artist traveling through a computerized underworld.
The “Grio College” exhibition also highlights the adaptable way Martine Syms approaches photography, showcasing the many scales and strategies by which she moves toward image-making.
Installations such as “Misdirected Kiss” and “Grand Calm,” previously unseen in the United States, show how her research-based projects come to assemble entire conditions, with photographs placed on the floor, walls, and intertwined in layered collections.
The “Grio College” exhibition is also accompanied by a screening of the most memorable element of Syms’ film, The African Desperate, and features new visual works and drawings.