A duplicate image of the artist swimming in a pool smiling overlaid with an AI rendering of the artist staring straight ahead.
All Projects

Dumb World

Dumb World

Martine Syms

Martine Syms

Martine Syms’s feature-length film, entitled Dumb World, explores how athleticism, race, and fame congeal around the violent ideologies embedded within the objects of technology with which we are most intimately connected.

Discipline:

Moving Image, Narrative Film, Video Art

Award Year:

2021

Large room with two monitors, one featuring the artist smoking a joint and the other featuring a blurry image, handgng from the ceiling in a red illuminated room.
A large rectangle made of metal studs with four monitors featuring text reading “go slow” and a man in bed and four large acrylic cut outs with images printed on them inside an orange room.

About Martine Syms

Los Angeles, CA

A black woman with short hair stands with her hands folded on one hip and looks at the camera. Martine Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation, and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.

Martine Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation, and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities.

A black woman with short hair stands with her hands folded on one hip and looks at the camera.