Curator, Lanka Tattersall: We’re looking at a work by the artist Martine Syms. It is a wallpaper that is full of images that come from Martine’s own archive of photographs, GIFs, videos. Syms originally made this work as a lecture about how Black women present themselves in the world, and how these images are then reproduced and altered before eventually being presented back to the very people they depict.
Here are excerpts from Martine Syms’s talk.
Artist, Martine Syms: I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of women, trying to learn something about them and maybe trying to learn something about myself.
More recently, I’ve been looking at a lot of pictures of my aunt. My memory of her was sitting in the kitchen telling me how to stand, how to dress, how to talk. I had gone to my own sort of charm school when I was in middle school. It was called T-Zone. It was started by Tyra Banks, former supermodel. In the evening, there were these sermons, led by Tyra, about self-esteem and body image. And they were very traumatic. Everyone just cried every night.
And it got me thinking about some of the ways you learn to move as a young woman. And I always wanted to move like my brothers really. The way they navigated the city felt more free than the way that I was being told to move through it. And now I like to take up as much space as possible. I like to use this phrase, “extreme presence.” And this became a way of protecting myself.
Black women often get used as a sort of shorthand, a way of responding, a meme. So as these images get repurposed by everyone, what do they signify? Looking shows us the kind of viewer that we can be. Because I believe that looking is a way of knowing. And I see these women.