Total

On the occasion of Martine Syms' exhibition, this catalog entitled Total retraces the artistic practice of Martine Syms since 2005, immersing readers in a total work of art that looks at the "theater of the everyday", the roles we play in it, and the surveillance mechanisms that control them. The artist's work br idges the gap between the public and the private, the seen and the unseen, the inside and the outside. Between intimate references, historical archives, cultural representations of Blackness, feminist history and invocations of spirituality, Total presents itself as a work in which the mechanisms of identity construction are played out and reflected. Author Claudia Rankine writes an academic essay analyzing Martine Syms' body of work. Artist and poet Hannah Black composes an experimental text based on astro logical references to Syms' personality. Finally, exhibition curator and director of the Lafayette Foundation Rebecca Lamarche is in conversation with the guest artist.