With This retrospective (open until February 9, 2025) the American artist Martine Syms invites visitors to experience a total work of art that unfolds across all floors of the Foundation, transforming it into a new kind of store. Composed of reproductions of sound elements workshops in Los Angeles – from the facade of the building to his office: this hybrid place creates a bridge between the public and the private, the visible and the inaccessible, the intimate and the collective, telling a certain story of our culture and the places that compose it. The artist presents a kaleidoscopic experience where existential questions are embodied in the works, then they are transformed into editions available for sale. In the artist's studio transformed into a commercial space, it itself becomes a film set, where the public experiences a project in an "everyday theater".
An exhibition that meditates on consumption and the origins of desire
The exhibition Total is therefore interested in the generalization of surveillance and the capture of permanent images of ourselves as a powerful dynamic of identity construction. What if we were all actors? of a film in perpetual production? And if “Reality” was largely written by the photo?
Between intimate references, historical archives, cultural representations of identity and blackness, feminist history and invocations of spirituality, Total is a space that resists too much legibility. A meditation on consumption as performance, but also on the performance of consumption, the exhibition aims to reflect on the things we desire and like as extensions of ourselves and our culture, while at the same time questioning the origins of our desire.
Let's get to know the artist better first
Martine Syms was born in 1988 in Los Angeles. She received a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College,
Annandale-on-Hudson (2017) and a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago (2007). She is known for her practice that combines conceptual boldness, humor and social commentary. Combining video, installation and performance, often intertwined with technical explorations
and narrative, Martine Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, radical feminist thought and traditions. Based on research, Syms's practice integrates theoretical models of performed, embedded or imposed identities, which have in particular tied to gender or race.
Her work has been the subject of international exhibitions, including several monographs including Total, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024); Presente Goo, Sadie Coles Headquarters, London (2023); Brutte Plymouth, Carré d'Art – Museum of Contemporary Art, Nîmes (2023); SHE MAD Sl:E4, MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2022); Collegio Grio, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On Hudson (2022); She Mad: Season One, Bergen Kunsthall (2021); Palude Neurale, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2021) and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2022). Group exhibitions include Coming Soon, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024); After laughter comes tears, MUDAM The Museum of Contemporary Art, Luxembourg (2023); The Stranger in the Village, Racism in the Mirror of
James Baldwin, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennial, Copenhagen
(2023); Signals: How Video Transformed the World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023) and
Trouble with Communication: Language and Power at Play Contemporary Art, SUNY Fredonia, New York (2023). In 2022, the film she directed and co-wrote, The African Desperate, opens in theaters in the United States. Martine Syms has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023); the United States Artists Fellowship (2020); and the Future Fields Commission in the category Time-Based Media (2020).
Cover image: Martine Syms, Lesson LXXV, 2017. [Still] single channel video © Martine Syms.
Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York
