This exhibition is the first in the United States to feature Martine Syms’s newly commissioned multichannel video installation, Neural Swamp. Embracing the tactics and technologies of sport, cinema, and surveillance, Syms’s work challenges racial and gender stereotypes and investigates what it means to be Black and a woman in a hyper-digitized world.
Created for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, Neural Swamp builds upon the artist’s research into machine systems that erase and exploit Black bodies, voices, and narratives. Blurring the lines between humor and horror, Syms uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to question the politics of images and the technologies that allow for their production and consumption. This exhibition will also feature selections from Syms’s Kita’s World, a series of videos that further explores how our everyday lives are increasingly mediated by technology.
Syms is the second recipient of the Future Fields Commission, which supports groundbreaking new work in film, video, digital media, sound, and performance by contemporary artists. The Commission is a joint initiative between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy.
