There’s a certain kind of New York’s culture vulture who can distinguish a Rick Owens shopping bag from a standard brown tote bag. If you can spot the difference (and you carry the former), you might just occupy the same world as artist Martine Syms—or at least, the one she’s lovingly portraying in her debut feature film The African Desperate (2022). In this film, Syms captures all the subtle signifiers of upper-middle class liberal art culture, from the Asai tops to Rimowa suitcases. If you know, you know—and you’re invited to the party.
The film depicts an MFA Fine Art student, Palace (Diamond Stingily), on the day of her graduation. The film opens with Palace undergoing her final exam, an interrogation by her painfully woke professors. Although she is undecided as to whether or not to attend the graduation party, Palace eventually attends after pressure from her friends (and a certain love interest), and we watch the night hilariously unfold.
Stingily is also an artist, and a close friend of Syms—a friendship that dates back to Syms’s own days as a student. “She was actually in my first video, which I made during my MFA,” Syms tells me, “I bought her a flight to New York. After the shoot, she told me not to buy the return ticket.” The challenge Syms set for herself with The African Desperate was to capture upper-middle class liberal art world culture. “Most films about the art world are pretty bad,” she says, laughing, “or inaccurate. It felt like a funny challenge to me, to get that tone exactly right.” This comes easily to Syms, who is a renowned multidisciplinary artist, working across video, photography, sculpture and more. She operates at the heart of the art world, with past solo exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC and Sadie Coles HQ in London.
Taking inspiration from 90s-era coming-of-age films, the stock characters (think The Breakfast Club) have been updated to the art school clichés of today, in an environment where, ironically, everyone strives for originality. That’s right—soft boi is definitely a social category now. It’s a film about those unspoken visual signifiers, which, in this environment, can be the gateways to social mobility. Does your coat have the four white stitches on the back below the collar? You’re in. These are codes Syms was taught by her peers at art school, and that time marked a cultural shift in her life which she also describes as a loss. However, the film is anything but sobering. In fact, since most of the film is set at a party, it’s quite the opposite.
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