Self-motivation is the imperative propelling her avatar across an empty plane as she repeatedly performs gruesome acts of self-annihilation - a knife to her stomach, a bullet to her head - until she finally just explodes into pieces. During this fifteen-minute loop, Martine’s eerily realistic likeness, made from a 3-D scan of her body (the back of her shirt reads: “To hell with my suffering”), wanders a bleak CGI Hades. Here Martine is singing - her vocals shifting between elegy and ecstasy, confession and affirmation. The artist’s voice is present as well in DED (2021), by screen size and drama the core piece of the show. The flow of insignificant moments only congeals into narrative tension when Martine and a man (the work’s off- screen interlocutors) momentarily sync, which only seems to happen when they exchange platitudes from the playbook of twenty-first-century online dating. There is just the passage of time, traffic jams (Martine is based in LA), sunset after sunset, and fireworks painting colors in the sky at the end of each loop. The installation’s short, shaky clips emulate a cinematography popularized by Instagram Stories: a mere succession of “and, and, and” that doesn’t add up to any meaningful telos.
Ugly Plymouths adopts cues from social media, texting, and online dating.
You may need a moment to acclimate as a babel of voices and images wash over you. The three-channel video installation forms a half circle in the center of the gallery space - a little bit like a group at a party, leaving an open spot for you. “Hiiiiii! Hi, hi, hi, hi!” Martine is smiling and waving on one of the vertical screens of Ugly Plymouths (2020). “Aphrodite’s Beasts” is Syms’s first solo show in Germany.
While Syms’s publishing ventures have created communities around her exploration of Blackness, her art addresses the “modern human condition” from an intimate point of view - moving the drama of existence across the fault lines of identity politics. Syms, whose work was shown at MoMA in 2017, has been compared to Arthur Jafa, who traces Black American culture by way of an archival, anthropological strategy. Martine Syms’s video art, photographs, and autobiographical fiction are anchored by a first-person narrator - with all her potential for dumb mistakes and quixotic drama.
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