The artist’s work often includes multiple versions of herself, presented
as avatars and through actors, to investigate – with satirical humour –
the experience of the Black body in the digital realm. It would be useful for the artist if she could replicate herself IRL, given her exhausting schedule this year. Winning the Future Fields Commission, she presented a new work at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, which then moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That was after having closed two museum solo shows at Bergen Kunsthall, in January, and Fridericianum, Kassel, in February, and before opening another two at MCA Chicago and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, New York. The latter is timed with her first foray into feature film (to be streamed on Mubi), The African Desperate, a satire of the artworld, and of art education, set at Bard and starring Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York gallerist, and artist A. L. Steiner, her former teacher, as her fictional professors.