In her durational performance video, Martine Gutierrez reimagines Odysseus’s encounter with sirens, as told in Homer’s The Odyssey, with a very different ending.

Odysseus and the Sirens is a 20-minute short film that documents Martine Gutierrez’s performance at The Polygon Gallery. Originally a durational piece over 40 minutes in length, the performance was staged on the opening night of Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis, curated by Elliott Ramsey, in 2024. The film premieres on Parallelogram at the same time that Gutierrez’s solo exhibition Wunderkind opens at at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, on view through Summer 2026.

Martine Guttierrez first collaborated with curator – and one of the five sirens – Elliott Ramsey when Ramsey invited her to participate in the 2021 group exhibition Interior Infinite, with three works from her landmark photographic series Indigenous Woman. Indigenous Woman was first published as a 124-page magazine in which Gutierrez served as artistic director, editor, model, and photographer, brilliantly conveying the sense of potential, transformation, and the elasticity of “self” that was central to Interior Infinite’s thesis.

This first collaboration led to the presentation of a major solo exhibition with Gutierrez at The Polygon Gallery in 2024, Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis. In this series of seventeen self-portraits, Gutierrez embodied a global pantheon of legendary, divine, or mythologised female figures from across history and culture, using only simple props and spare costumes.

For the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, Gutierrez staged a new performance work that presents an eighteenth figure: the siren, from Homer’s The Odyssey. She envisions these sirens not as birdlike beings, as they appear in the original Greek text, but rather as mermaids. And unlike The Odyssey, in which Odysseus instructs his crew to resist seduction by the sirens’ song by plugging their ears with wax, Gutierrez’s sailor succumbs to the mermaids.