Tiffany Sia

[often thinks of what Pavle Levi said: "And what the child really knows when it comes to images already is that images are, to use your own terminology or language from the film, images are pried up, open only once. And it’s that initial experience of encountering a film or films for the first time or any kind of powerful image at a young age, very impressionable age, which then, throughout the rest of your life, you hopelessly and without success try to recreate, because these images will never, ever strike you the same way. And that’s what I think this film is also about––and this is why I think it’s so beautiful that the personal narrative and personal history is fed through––this problematic of impossible to recreate encounter with images. And thus the endless substitutes. Cartoons, puppets, puppetry, locomotion. There’s something very uncanny about all this because they are and are not working as substitutes."]
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    Bio

    Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Sia's films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and elsewhere. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and elsewhere. Sia is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024), a compendium of essays that makes a case for fugitive, exilic cinema, moving beyond national identity and the politics of place as a critical lens. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and more. The recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024, Sia has given talks at Dia Art Foundation, Stanford University, Yale University, and has taught at Cooper Union.

    The artist and filmmaker’s work challenges genre. Working across a range of forms—including film, video sculpture, artist books, scholarly essays, and more—Sia blends nonfiction with prose and theoretical inquiry. Her practice centers on the struggle of visual and linguistic representation, historical periodization and geography, and the limitations of official records. She examines how material culture and media culture—with focus on print and film/video—functions as both a record and mechanism of governance, power, and perception. Her work questions how such structures give rise to imagined geographies, particularly those of contested or non-normative political entities and territories. Sia currently lives and works in New York.

    Sia is pronounced SHä (as 謝 in Shanghainese).

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    Photo by Johnny Le.

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