Installation view of Misdirected Kiss, on view in Martine Syms: Grio College.⁠ ⁠ The collage of images and texts in Misdirected Kiss resembles a computer screen overlaid with dozens of windows open—as if glimpsing an individual’s internet browsing and bookmarking. In 2016, Syms delivered a series of multimedia performance lectures titled "Misdirected Kiss,” in which she talked through the presentation of Black women’s bodies, while a projection displayed her computer desktop as she dragged and clicked through audio files, images, and texts, populating the screen with eBay searches, Vines, GIFs, digital books, quotes, memes, video clips, screenshots, images of Black women, strangers, celebrities, personal photographs. ⁠ ⁠ Syms uses both familial history and pop culture history as an archive of sources in her presentation of Blackness, and the installation echoes this accumulation of media: passages from film and cultural theory texts mix with a dashcam image of Sandra Bland’s 2015 traffic stop; a photo of Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space; snapshots of Syms, her relatives, her close friend and collaborator Diamond Stingily; stills from the early silent films Laughing Gas—in which a Black woman, on a nitrous oxide high from a dentist visit, wanders erratically through a city, humorously disrupting the public with her uncontrollable laughter and exaggerated movements—and The Misdirected Kiss, in which a white man accidentally kisses a Black maid instead of his white lover. In layering and connecting these images, Syms presents a compilation of what the cultural historian Alison Landsberg, whose text can be seen in the collage, refers to as “prosthetic memory”: the claiming of historical events that may not have been experienced personally but which become a part of the collective memory due to the viral dissemination of mass and social media—the private feeling of public memories. ⁠- Bonnie Chau ⁠ Martine Syms: Grio College is on view through November 27th. To learn more, please visit the link in our bio.⁠ ⁠ Also on view - Dara Birnbaum: Reaction and Black Melancholia⁠ ⁠ Museum Hours:⁠ Wednesday - Mon, 12pm-6pm⁠ ⁠ Photo: Olympia Shannon⁠ ⁠ #martinesyms