Tiffany Sia

Join artist Tiffany Sia for a talk titled “They Prefer Us When We’re Dead,” which draws from a forthcoming essay by the artist that positions the law as the apparatus of the medium of video. While materialist film theory locates cinema’s anti-illusionist properties in light, celluloid, and sound, Sia insists that censorship, copyright, contract law, and national security laws constitute video’s most consequential substrate, shaping how images circulate and survive. Moving through her own overlapping positions as author, contractor, seller, rights holder, and public figure, Sia traces how different applications of the law structure risk and value unevenly across film and art contexts, and across jurisdictions.

Free with RSVP.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer currently based in New York. Her films have screened at New York Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, among other festivals. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art; and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Sia is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) and was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024.