They Prefer Us When We’re Dead w/ Tiffany Sia

A talk on hidden legal forces shaping moving-image art today

Tiffany Sia, What Rules The Invisible, 2022 (still). Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank

//February 16th

//5.30 PM

//GEM Lab, FB 630.15

//1250 rue Guy

Artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia explores the often-unseen legal infrastructures that govern the circulation, ownership, and risk of moving image artworks today. Expanding on materialist film theory, this talk examines how censorship, copyright, and national security laws shape the conditions under which films and videos are made, shown, and received–particularly in contexts marked by surveillance and repression. Through personal reflection and critical analysis, Sia addresses how artists, curators, and institutions navigate these pressures, and why formalist approaches to cinema must account for the legal and political terrain in which images operate. From ghost stories and state violence to property law and platform regulation, she outlines a global and deeply entangled view of aesthetics, law, and power.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. 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 a focus on print and film/video—functions as both a record and a 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'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; The Mudam, Luxembourg; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. 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 work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, and elsewhere. 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.

This program is part of a multi-year research project examining the shifting aesthetics, practices, and technologies of video and art across the Asia Pacific. Led by the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab and the University of Hong Kong with additional partners, the project includes a publication and a series of public lectures, screenings, and interdisciplinary workshops connecting academic researchers and creative practitioners across Montreal and Hong Kong.