Misdirected Kiss originated as a performative lecture where Syms told a story about movement, gesture, and language through observations about Black female performers in the media and her own life. While lecturing, the artist projected her computer’s desktop as she opened and layered windows of images and video clips from her visual archive; this accumulation is the basis for the work on view here. Syms’s title refers to a set of early American silent films where white men accidentally kiss Black women in a moment of obscured vision. “Blackness is a discourse, and rather than say what it is or ain’t, I think about how blackness and other identities are constructed,” Syms has said. “They’re abstractions that are made concrete by social, economic, and legislative phenomena.”
Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, November 3–February 22, 2024
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