Thursday, December 01, 6:00 p.m.
Over the last five years, Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist and writer Tiffany Sia has produced a series of urgent works that examine the making, circulation, and collection of images in times of upheaval and crisis. Centered on her place of birth, its ongoing political movement, and the ever-present residue of its colonial history, the implications of Sia’s projects reverberate globally. In collage-like essays culled from online videos, news media, state archives, and material shot with her own mobile device, Sia highlights connections between state power, big tech, and corporate media while offering a radical and emancipatory vision for a media built on lived experience, shared memory, and the subversion of official channels of information. Sia will present three film/videos, NEVER REST/UNREST (2020), DO NOT CIRCULATE (2021), and WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE (2022), and discuss them in relation to her recent writings and connected artworks.
Tiffany Sia, 2020-2022, Hong Kong/ USA, ca 60 minutes plus audience discussion
Digital video
In Cantonese, Mandarin, and English
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PROGRAM
NEVER REST/UNREST, 2020, Hong Kong, 28 minutes
Growing out of a series of the artist’s Instagram stories tracking the relentless political turmoil in Hong Kong throughout 2019, NEVER REST/UNREST provides a vertically oriented, hand-held counter narrative to sensationalist international reportage. In doing so, Sia takes up Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s call for an anti-colonial “Imperfect Cinema” that resists convention, fabrication, and authority.
DO NOT CIRCULATE, 2021, Hong Kong, 17 minutes
In DO NOT CIRCULATE, Sia follows the image trail of the Prince Edward Station Attack, an event during Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations in which police indiscriminately attacked protestors at a subway station, juxtaposing imagery uploaded by witnesses during the event with official accounts. A relentless voiceover weaves through disinformation, rumors, and superstition.
WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE, 2022, USA, 10 minutes
WHAT RULES THE INVISIBLE juxtaposes amateur travelogue footage shot throughout 20th century Hong Kong with Sia’s mother’s accounts of colonial police raids, sewage, and ghosts in postwar Kowloon.
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ABOUT
Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Hong Kong. Sia’s films have been screened at the New York City International Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art Doc Fortnight, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Prismatic Ground, among others. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet, a chapbook published by Inpatient Press in 2019, and the artist book sequel, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, published through Speculative Place Press in 2020. Her writing has been published in Film Quarterly, October, and elsewhere. Sia’s artworks have been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf), and elsewhere. She received the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award in 2021. In addition to her artistic practice, Sia is the founder of the experimental project space Speculative Place and a film producer, serving as the executive producer for Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s EMPTY METAL (2018), and executive producer of Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s forthcoming documentary AANIKOOBIJIGAN [ANCESTOR / GREAT-GRANDPARENT / GREAT-GRANDCHILD].