Martine Syms: Natural Swamp

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents a new installation by Martine Syms: Natural Swap from November 5 to January 30. The artwork will be presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in spring 2022.

Martine Syms works with film, performance, installation, and publishing. The central theme of her works is the black female body and its representation, along with the sense of fragmentation and performativity that characterize culture in the time of the internet and social media. Her works reveal how identity is now built, exhibited, packaged, and consumed.

Natural Swap is an immersive installation featuring Athena, Dee, and the narrator. Each protagonist appears on a monitor or a screen, the images are projected on the exhibition surface, invading the space together with their voices, engaged in the reading of a script that is generated in real-time by an AI writing software. The work focuses on the proliferation and circulation of images as well as her ongoing research around the technological systems that erase or render invisible black bodies, voices, and narratives.