Collection in Focus: Martine Syms

Martine Syms’s (US, b. 1988) The Borrowed Lady (2016) examines how decontextualized gestures circulate online. Against an all-purple backdrop, four video monitors stand in a circle, facing inward. The artist Diamond Stingily appears in patterned blips across each screen—snapping, calling out, shifting her body. Evoking the public sphere of the internet, the installation replicates the web’s dense network of posts, reposts, and clapbacks.

The Borrowed Lady emerged from a moment when social media was rapidly transforming the way that culture spread. In the piece, Stingily performs a series of gestures drawn in part from GIFs and memes of Black women’s expressions. A decade after its creation, the work remains both a portrait of an earlier media moment and a reflection of the continued hypervisibility of Blackness in visual culture.

This presentation is part of the Walker’s Collection in Focus series, spotlighting major works in the museum’s collection.