Horizontal Vertigo: Martine Syms
Incense Sweaters & Ice
25 - 26 Apr 2020
HORIZONTAL VERTIGO: MARTINE SYMS
Incense Sweaters & Ice
Online Screening
25 – 26 April 2020
Join the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION for an online screening of Martine Syms’s first feature length film Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), on Saturday, April 25, 2020, at 8:00 p.m. CEST.
The stream will be available at www.jsc.art/mediathek until midnight on Sunday, April 26, 2020.
In Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), Martine Syms’s first feature-length film, the American artist examines the movement and performance of the black body in various environments and in relationship to the camera. Loosely based on a performance the Misdirected Kiss (2016), the film follows three characters: Girl, Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, and WB (“whiteboy”) through different phases of watching, being watched, and remaining unseen.
Scenes from Girl’s daily life, travels, and relationship with WB are interspersed with footage of Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White singing inspirational phrases about how to carry oneself in public, saying things like “have a positive attitude” and “you deserve to be seen.” Syms is interested in how the characters perform differently in each setting and when they are aware of being recorded, investigating a politics of representation between surveillance and self-promotion, documentation and broadcast.
The camera is a central character in the film. In each scene, the camera performs a different role such as the boyfriend, the audience, the surveillance camera, the documentary filmmaker, or the director, negating any neutrality the camera’s gaze is thought to have. This brings forth another set of questions concerning authority and control: What forms of subjugation emerge by the potentiality of being filmed at any given moment? And how does one navigate a reality where even your most intimate spaces—the home—is invaded by the camera on your phone?
Syms has called the kind of filmmaking she employs in Incense Sweaters & Ice “ambient cinema”: “If anything you do on camera is like a performance then you can expand that more broadly to think about the different types of surveillance that you’re subjected to, and how there’s an ongoing film being made,” she explains. “I’m just saying that we are all being recorded all the time and you can think about that as a kind of filmmaking.”
MARTINE SYMS (b. 1988, Los Angeles) uses film, video, installation, performance, and various digital technologies such as apps, augmented reality, and chatbots to investigate blackness and the conditions of contemporary image culture. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, ICA London, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. She has lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Recently presented exhibitions include BOON, Secession, Vienna; Shame Space, ICA Virginia Commonwealth University; Grand Calme, SCHQ; Big Surprise, Bridget Donahue Gallery; Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms, Serralves Museum, Porto; Projects 106: Martine Syms, MoMA; Fact and Trouble, ICA London. From 2007–11 she was the co-director of the Chicago artist-run project space Golden Age, and she currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
MARTINE SYMS – INCENSE SWEATERS & ICE is part of horizontal vertigo, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.
Incense Sweaters & Ice
Online Screening
25 – 26 April 2020
Join the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION for an online screening of Martine Syms’s first feature length film Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), on Saturday, April 25, 2020, at 8:00 p.m. CEST.
The stream will be available at www.jsc.art/mediathek until midnight on Sunday, April 26, 2020.
In Incense Sweaters & Ice (2017), Martine Syms’s first feature-length film, the American artist examines the movement and performance of the black body in various environments and in relationship to the camera. Loosely based on a performance the Misdirected Kiss (2016), the film follows three characters: Girl, Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, and WB (“whiteboy”) through different phases of watching, being watched, and remaining unseen.
Scenes from Girl’s daily life, travels, and relationship with WB are interspersed with footage of Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White singing inspirational phrases about how to carry oneself in public, saying things like “have a positive attitude” and “you deserve to be seen.” Syms is interested in how the characters perform differently in each setting and when they are aware of being recorded, investigating a politics of representation between surveillance and self-promotion, documentation and broadcast.
The camera is a central character in the film. In each scene, the camera performs a different role such as the boyfriend, the audience, the surveillance camera, the documentary filmmaker, or the director, negating any neutrality the camera’s gaze is thought to have. This brings forth another set of questions concerning authority and control: What forms of subjugation emerge by the potentiality of being filmed at any given moment? And how does one navigate a reality where even your most intimate spaces—the home—is invaded by the camera on your phone?
Syms has called the kind of filmmaking she employs in Incense Sweaters & Ice “ambient cinema”: “If anything you do on camera is like a performance then you can expand that more broadly to think about the different types of surveillance that you’re subjected to, and how there’s an ongoing film being made,” she explains. “I’m just saying that we are all being recorded all the time and you can think about that as a kind of filmmaking.”
MARTINE SYMS (b. 1988, Los Angeles) uses film, video, installation, performance, and various digital technologies such as apps, augmented reality, and chatbots to investigate blackness and the conditions of contemporary image culture. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, ICA London, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. She has lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Recently presented exhibitions include BOON, Secession, Vienna; Shame Space, ICA Virginia Commonwealth University; Grand Calme, SCHQ; Big Surprise, Bridget Donahue Gallery; Contemporary Projects: Martine Syms, Serralves Museum, Porto; Projects 106: Martine Syms, MoMA; Fact and Trouble, ICA London. From 2007–11 she was the co-director of the Chicago artist-run project space Golden Age, and she currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
MARTINE SYMS – INCENSE SWEATERS & ICE is part of horizontal vertigo, a year-long program at the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION in Düsseldorf and Berlin, curated by Lisa Long.