Martine Syms

Martine Syms

Birth : 1988-01-01, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A

Profile

Martine Syms

Movies

The African Desperate
Screenplay
It’s MFA grad Palace Bryant’s final 24 hours in art school, and she is not going to the graduation party! She needs to get back home to Chicago from Upstate New York, but that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.
The African Desperate
Producer
It’s MFA grad Palace Bryant’s final 24 hours in art school, and she is not going to the graduation party! She needs to get back home to Chicago from Upstate New York, but that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.
The African Desperate
Director
It’s MFA grad Palace Bryant’s final 24 hours in art school, and she is not going to the graduation party! She needs to get back home to Chicago from Upstate New York, but that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.
Soliloquy
Director
In Soliloquy, part of the Kita’s World series, Martine Syms creates digital avatar Kita, who acts as cultural commentator, speaking to questions of consciousness within the systems of race, capitalism, and technology.
She Mad: Bitch Zone
Writer
At a weeklong camp for teenage girls, a counselor leads the campers through a series of exercises that blend the language of female empowerment and body positivity with the kind of radical transparency that makes for good reality TV. The exercises culminate in a bizarre group confessional.
She Mad: Bitch Zone
Director
At a weeklong camp for teenage girls, a counselor leads the campers through a series of exercises that blend the language of female empowerment and body positivity with the kind of radical transparency that makes for good reality TV. The exercises culminate in a bizarre group confessional.
Lessons I— CLXXX
Director
Over a four-year period, Martine Syms gathered 180 video clips—each 30 seconds long—from sources such as YouTube, talk shows, Vine, and her own personal video diaries. They focus largely on media images and everyday gestures of Blackness that circulate across the electronic devices that shape contemporary life, with each clip functioning as a canto or stanza in Lessons I-CLXXX. The clips echo the format of short advertisements, and suggest that the private moments of one individual are inscribed within a larger collective and commercial culture. They are woven together and sequenced randomly to create an open-ended poetic collage inspired by and participating in the Black radical tradition. Syms’s earliest lessons draw on the poet Kevin Young’s encyclopedic work of literary and cultural criticism, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), in which the traditions, or “lessons,” of Black life are understood as the center of American culture.
Incense, Sweaters, & Ice
Director
Incense, Sweaters, and Ice is a new feature film inspired by the idea that anything one does while being watched is a performance. The film follows three protagonists—Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”)—as they navigate the dramas of surveillance, moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. How does the ever present potential image affect the way we act and the way we see ourselves? By examining how cinema now happens in real time, Syms works between the documented and the live to find the lie.
An Evening with Queen White
Director
An improvised monologue performed by an invented character partly inspired by Syms' great aunt, her godmother and Maxine Powell, the director of Personal Development at Motown.
A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere
Director
A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere uses the premise of a pitch and the formula of Sitcom to deliver an essay on representation, self-presentation, viewership and embedded codes, as they exist on the American screen. All this, paced by commercial interruptions as Lessons, with the same stakes in hand.
Memory Palace
Director
Memory Palace is a short video grounded in the personal history of the artist. A discovery of a photo album activates memories of physical spaces, which in turn open doors to reminiscences of past family life. Inspired by the classical method of loci, the film presents a woman — singer/songwriter Alice Smith — at work in Los Angeles. - Video Data Bank
My Only Idol is Reality
Director
My Only Idol is Reality is a video work created from an excerpt of Season One of MTV’s The Real World. The piece uses repetition as a framework for abstraction.
DED
Director
DED shows Martine Syms's digital avatar-based on a 3-D scan of her body—in a vast virtual landscape against an infinite horizon. She casually walks among other characters, runs, bleeds, and excretes. Her t-shirt back reads “TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING”. The main refrain of the soundtrack, composed and performed by Syms, reverberates: "I want to give and receive infinite possibilities."