Martine Syms

“I grew up in Los Angeles. I watched lots of television; I still watch lots of television.”

“My mum was very interested in art and liked to write, and my dad was a hobbyist photographer.”

“I'm interested in the economy of words and forms: jokes, aphorisms, copywriting, advertising, that way of writing when meaning has to be squeezed into as few words as possible.”

“If some things don't make me feel good, I stop them. How simple, yet so hard to do.”

“My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.”

“It's very comforting to feel myself getting stronger.”

“I feel like there are actually a lot of relationships between a website and a film in terms of designing an experience for a screen.”

“I never understood why anyone cared about the Kardashians until a friend, who's Latina, told me that she liked them because they're a family who look like hers. I was able to appreciate them differently.”

“I've always been interested in the manufacturing of narratives, identities, and ideologies, and how they are embodied and negotiated by viewers.”

“There's an uncanniness to living in Los Angeles, from the way you move through the city to the moments of feeling familiarity or deja vu, like you've been somewhere or you know something when you really don't.”

“There's a certain amount of absurdity to the idea that having extremely crisp clothes is what's going to get you through the door. And there's a certain sad reality to it, too.”

“I grew up watching tons and tons of television. It was all I would do, especially during summer vacations.”

“I definitely think an on-screen experience is universal, in a way.”

“I'm so voracious with books, movies, TV, and I'm always interested in the way that different cultural values are presented or, in their absence, are present.”

“Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist I learned about pretty early on. She's one of the first contemporary artists I knew about and was really drawn to.”

“One of my early memories is of a white girl twirling in a circle. I realized later on that it was from that show 'Small Wonder' - the oldest I could have been when I was watching it was four or five, but it's one I think about a lot. It's stuck in my head, this terrible Fox television show.”

“People act like art is a white thing - or not for people of colour - when, really, so much culture and art comes from people of colour. I want everyone to get into what I am doing. So sometimes I don't like to work just in an art context because it feels like a lot of people aren't going to see it. I like it to be a part of everyday life.”

“I have said it before and I will continue to say that I don't think art is the most effective form of protest. I don't think it changes policy; I think it changes discourse, and discourse can change ideas, and for me, that's what it's about: having that space for conversation.”

“Representation is a sort of surveillance.”

“A lot of my work, the subject is film and television itself, and history, and how that kind of coincides with larger cultural history and memory.”