Tiffany Sia

Artists Space is pleased to present the first institutional exhibition by Tiffany Sia. Slippery When Wet highlights primary and secondary accounts, timelines, white papers, and political critique as an exhaustive receipt of our times. The exhibition proposes a wet ontology of Hong Kong, a city in ongoing transfiguration slipping into an uncanny vision of itself. The city secretes, leaving a trail of ink, tears, humidity, and leaks. Activating exilic spectatorship, the works usurp these fraught channels to make the shortest distance between two places: between New York and Hong Kong, between Artists Space and Speculative Place (the artist's residency program and project space on Lamma Island). An obsessive material accumulation of intimacy between geographies emerges as Sia asks, "How can I dig your way to Hong Kong?"

Emanating from the newly published Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, these works on paper and in moving image propose a poetics across a multitude of temporal frames. In addition to the installation in the gallery, the exhibition is meant to be experienced virtually on Artists Space's website (beginning February 17th), to allow for greater access to the geographically-dispersed community of Hong Kongers throughout the world.

From March 14 – 20th, Sia will present a weeklong series of durational performances timed with the sunrise/sunset between Hong Kong and New York. Artists Space will be open during the additional hours of 6:30 – 7:30pm nightly, and a livestreamed broadcast will begin around 6:30pm EST on Artists Space's website. From March 26 – 31st, her film Never Rest/Unrest (2020), will be featured in MoMA's Doc Fortnight festival and at Artists Space in site-specific form.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker and founder of Speculative Place. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet, a series of anti-travelogues on smut, affect and history of Hong Kong. A chapbook, in the disguise of a vintage softcore porn magazine, it was published by Inpatient Press. Sia is the director of the short, experimental film Never Rest/Unrest, which screened as part of a retrospective in the Propositions program at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. She is also part of Home Cooking, an artist collective founded by Asad Raza, on which she contributes the performance and reading series Hell is a Timeline.