Martine Syms

The acerbically funny and intimate screenplay for acclaimed visual artist Martine Syms's debut film, The African Desperate.The African Desperate follows Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in upstate New York and ends at a Chicago Blue Line Station. Set against the lush backdrop of late summer, Palace navigates the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world. Shot through with Syms’s celebrated conceptual grit, humor, social commentary, and vivid visual language, The African Desperate leads us through picturesque landscapes and artists studios, from academic critiques to backseat hookups, and from the night of a wild graduation party to the morning of a lonely trip back home.

What conditions inscription? Why are certain statements allowed to emerge in archival substrates? These questions are asked in this publication as it explores the concept of inscription—the archival moment that is constituted by the materialization of statements. It does so by including approaches from a variety of academic fields such as media theory, philosophy and critical theory, as well as works by practitioners of contemporary art. The publication includes contributions by Akram Zaatari, Amalia Ulman, Anne de Vries, Cecilia Grönberg, D-M Withers, Hannah Quinlan, Jenna Sutela, Karl-Magnus Johansson, Lori Emerson, Martin Kohout, Martine Syms, Monira al Qadiri, Rosie Hastings, and Yuk Hui.