With her first retrospective in France, American artist Martine Syms invites visitors to experience a total work of art that extends throughout the Fondation, transforming it into a store of a new kind.
Composed of reproductions of elements from her Los Angeles studio — from the façade of the building to her office — this hybrid space bridges the public and private spheres, the seen and the inaccessible, the intimate and the collective, telling a certain story of our culture and the places that make it. The artist presents a kaleidoscopic experience in which existential questions are embodied in the works, which are then turned into editions available for sale. Through the transformation of the artist’s studio into a retail space turned film set, the public experiences a project invested in the“theater of the everyday”, the roles we play in it, and the mechanisms that control them.
Total deals with the generalization of surveillance and the permanent capture of our image as powerful dynamics in the construction of identities. What if we were all actors in a film in perpetual production? What if “reality” was written by images?
Between intimate references, historical archives, cultural representations of blackness, feminist history, and invocations of spirituality, Total refracts the mechanisms of legibility. A meditation on consumption as performance, but also on the performance of consumption, the exhibition proposes that we consider the things we desire as extensions of ourselves and our culture, while at the same time questioning the origins of these very desires.
