BOOK FORMAT
Flexi, 5.5 x 8 in. / 240 pgs / 190 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/17/2020
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2021 p. 17

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781734489743 TRADE
List Price: $20.00 CAD $28.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

THE FALL 2025 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Preview our FALL 2025 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.

PRIMARY INFORMATION

Martine Syms: Shame Space

Diaries of an avatar: a Bible-style artist’s book of writings by Martine Syms

A new artist’s book by California-based artist Martine Syms (born 1988), Shame Space explores the possibilities of narrative and identity, collecting journal writings by the artist from 2015 to 2017 in which she attempts to capture her shadow self, alongside image stills from the video project Ugly Plymouths. The text entries form the voiceover of Mythiccbeing (pronounced “my thick being’), a “black, upwardly mobile, violent, solipsistic, sociopathic, gender-neutral femme” digital avatar who has iterated across several of Syms’ recent exhibitions. In Syms’ installations, Mythiccbeing manifests variously in video, audio and as an interactive chatbot that responds to the viewer’s communications with messages and animations. In Shame Space, the character’s autofictional, diaristic commentary is gathered into 15 chapters. Its design updates the Bible format with its A5 size, embossed leather-textured cover and silver edge painting. The Ugly Plymouths still-image selection was coded using a programming script, such that the design, like the chatbot’s SMS responses, is an exercise in machine automation.

A spread from 'Martine Syms: Shame Space.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Brooklyn Rail

Megan Liberty

Shame Space, a small red softcover with gold edging that references the design of pocket bibles, slows the speed of internet saturation by separating text and image into two distinct components.[...] Shame Space is about the privately performed self-made public, but the format—the book—disrupts the speed and consumption of that self and, in turn, the selves presented by others.

Tank

Lilly Markaki

Through Syms’ pages, we enter a reflective, meditative space, whose temporality is akin to that of a long, solitary drive.

Art In America

Lucy Ives

Concerned as much with archiving as creating, and asks us to consider what it may mean for our memories and identities that there is little ready distinction to be drawn between these two acts today.