Tiffany Sia

Technical Difficulties is an exhibition about a film that hasn’t yet been made, or perhaps never will be, given scenes that cannot be reconstructed in their original place and too costly to make. This is an assemblage of tableaus beyond reenactment. The title suggests a euphemism on interrupted screenings, a conceit of low fidelity image-making, and a disturbance of any direct narrative.

A Child Already Knows is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a sojourn through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same period. Train sounds whir.

Journey From North to South is a road movie, configured on a 3-channel rackmount monitor, filmed through interstates over a 22-hour long drive southward. Partly tracing the Mississippi delta, the car takes a brief detour in a Chinese cemetery in Greenville and ends in Biloxi. The title takes inspiration from wuxia (martial arts) cinema.

An Image on Air is a description, shown on a surtitle board (typically used for translation during live performances), of scenes in which public figures on live broadcast reflect on the then novel experience of being “on air.”

Tiffany Sia was born in Hong Kong in 1988 and lives and works in New York. Sia is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Sia has directed several short films, including Never Rest/Unrest, 2020, Do Not Circulate, 2021 and What Rules the Invisible, 2022, which have screened at New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Sia has previously had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Ireland and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, Artforum, LUX Moving Image and elsewhere. Inpatient Press published her chapbook Salty Wet in 2019, and Speculative Place published its sequel Too Salty Too Wet in 2020. Her first collection of essays On and Off-Screen Imaginaries was just published in 2024 by Primary Information.