A major work by LA-based artist Martine Syms was gifted to Leeds Art Gallery through the Valeria Napoleone XX Contemporary Art Society (VN XX CAS) initiative. This scheme encourages debate about and action against gender inequality in museum collections by donating work of a living female artist to a UK museum each year.
Syms works in publishing, performance, video, essay and photography. The artist often juxtaposes her own voice or appearance with found footage from the Internet, film and TV – particularly sitcoms – to probe linguistic and visual representation of gender and African-Americans in the mass media.
The video A Pilot for a Show About Nowhere (2015) was originally commissioned by the New Museum in New York. It gives a pastiched history of the depictions of African Americans in television, incorporating footage from a number of sources, such as The Cosby Show. Black sitcoms in the United States hold the potential to break down widely held preconceptions. At the same time, they often erase the struggles and realities of the people they represent. The work is a pilot for an imagined sitcom by Syms called She Mad, and re-enactments of the artist’s life ground the film in her own biography. Her appropriation of footage from American sitcoms, combined with a sophisticated take on 21st-century social media communication gives her a very distinct voice hat has not yet been seen in museums in the UK.
The video formed a centrepiece of a major collections redisplay at Leeds Art Gallery in 2017, which encouraged new audiences to visit and explore the permanent exhibitions in the museum’s renovated spaces. It also formed an entry point to contemporaryart for an audience not familiar with it, asit strongly relates to the demographics of the communities that Leeds Art Gallery serves. Leeds Art Gallery particularly benefited from receiving Sym’s video work through VN XX CAS due to its strong connectionto a number of academic institutions in the region and its sound interest in working towards gender balance in both the collection and programme, for which this significant work pushes further discussion.
