Martine Syms: She Mad: Season One / Sidsel Meineche Hansen: Inner Child

Martine Syms
She Mad: Season One

Martine Syms, born 1988 in Los Angeles, has emerged in recent years as one of the defining artists of her generation. Her work combines in-depth research on the history of mass media with humour and social commentary, using film, photography, installation, performance and writing. The exhibition presents the artist’s work to a broader audience in Scandinavia for the first time. Within a specifically developed architectural installation, viewers are invited into an immersive presentation which features a survey of Syms’ ongoing episodic project She Mad (2015–present).

Martine Syms explores how mass media shapes and frames identities and cultures. Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of black identity and gender appear in the public imagination. The installation at Bergen Kunsthall consists of a purple metal grid construction which zig zags through the four aligned galleries, creating multiple vantage points for viewing the films, as well as demarcating and re-structuring the original exhibition architecture.

The episodic project She Mad takes the form of a fragmented imagined television series. The episodes revolve around a protagonist also named Martine—an overachieving, stoner graphic designer who lives in Hollywood and wishes she were an important artist. The first episode Pilot for a Show about Nowhere (2015) tells a semi-autobiographical account of Syms’ own life as a young black woman, merging dead-pan jokes about TV culture with a video essay-like narrative on the history of commercial television and its assumed target audiences, in the format of a sitcom. The episode Laughing Gas (2016) draws on early cinema, specifically the 1907 silent film of the same name by Edwin Porter, one of the earliest examples of a black female actress, Bertha Regustus, performing an independent role on-screen. Intro to Threat Modeling (2017) is told through email exchanges, screengrabs, and an avatar, outlining the effects of surveillance on subjectivity. The recent episode Bitch Zone (2020), takes us to an empowerment programme for teenage girls founded by supermodel and business mogul Tyra Banks. The Non-Hero (2021) is commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall. In this episode Martine pulls back the curtain on her battle with depression and suicidal ideation during her rocket ride to art super stardom.

While Syms’ work is based on television production in the US, these cultural formats have become influential across the whole Western world, also in Norway, and have communicated normative ideals as well as diverse identity models and desires. 

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where the exhibition will open summer 2022. A new publication will be produced in collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Also opening:

Sidsel Meineche Hansen 
Inner child

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, born 1981, is an artist based in London. The artist’s practice spans a diverse range of media including wood, clay and metals through which crafted objects are made, to Computer Generated Imagery, VR animations, video and other digital media. Hansen makes installations and artworks based on her ongoing enquiry into virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to human labour within the gaming, pornographic and tech-industries. Many of her artworks examine virtual reality in connection to capitalist reality by appropriating existing means of digital production. The exhibition Inner Child at Bergen Kunsthall includes a newly commissioned Virtual Reality experience together with recent sculptural works.

The work Inner Child (tin) (2021) presents the title of the exhibition on the gallery wall in the form of individual letters cast in tin with the letter ‘h’ shaped as a crude kitchen knife. The letters and the knife re-appear as central elements in a live-rendered animation of the same title wherein the knife drops and divides a brain in half. The animation is the opening sequence of a live-rendered Virtual Reality experience, devised by three A.I. characters in a gory environment of interpersonal exchange. The artwork is based on the artist’s interest in the healing phenomena of the “inner child” as a pedagogical approach to trauma and co-dependency, which was popularised by the self-help movement.

Reflecting on the artist’s relationship to institutional frameworks, Hansen invited Bergen Kunsthall’s staff to take an attachment-style test based on their individual experience of intimate relationships. The work SECURE, (2021) which anonymously summarises the attachment style of the Kunsthall’s employees as a group, takes the form of a medal, stamped in silver, with resemblance to the Norwegian military award for meritorious achievements of importance to the nation and society.

The exhibition also includes a series of sculptural works by the artist which focuses on the social standing of groups based on inclusion and exclusion. These include: Home vs owner (rule of six) (2021), a cutlery set in silver, originally forged by hand and reproduced to a total of six cutlery sets, referencing the limit of social gatherings during lockdown measures in the UK; and Home vs owner 1 (2020), a chimney that the artist made from bricks, as the part of a house which can be made without building a family home.

Related events:

Opening
Friday, November 12, 7–10pm

Tours
Every Sunday, 2pm 
Every Sunday, 1pm, Families

Plattform
Gry Rustad & Timotheus Vermeulen
Saturday November 13, 2pm

Plattform
Mandy Merck, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Therese Henningsen
Maintenancer
Wednesday, November 18, 8pm
Screening and talk
Venue: Online

Plattform
Louis Chude-Sokei
The Desires of Objects: Slavery and the Sex-Life of Machines
Saturday, January 8, 2pm
Venue: Online

Martine Syms
Incense Sweaters & Ice, 2017
Tuesday, January 11, 6pm
Venue: Cinemateket i Bergen
Film screening in collaboration with Cinemateket i Bergen