Tiffany Sia and Aria Dean, artists and thinkers at the forefront of media art today, join us for a Modern Mondays evening presenting a trio of Sia’s video works in conjunction with the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World.
Over the past five years, Tiffany Sia has chronicled Hong Kong’s colonial past and tumultuous present, creating lyrical video montages of handheld reportage, news footage, online content, and archival material. In 2019, she focused on the massive antigovernment demonstrations, using both her own recordings and footage that circulated and leaked online through encrypted apps to compose Never Rest / Unrest (2020) and Do Not Circulate (2021). What Rules the Invisible (2022) juxtaposes amateur travelogue footage shot throughout 20th-century Hong Kong with Sia’s mother’s accounts of colonial police, sewage, and ghosts in postwar Kowloon.
Sia will be joined in conversation by Aria Dean, whose essay for the Signals exhibition catalogue explores video and witnessing—whether the smartphone videos shot by passersby or the bodycam footage of police violence. Focusing on the ways in which these videos are taken up in the work of John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective, Tony Cokes, and American Artist, Dean addresses one of the most pressing questions of our time: What can video evidence do, and how can it be deployed in the service of poetry or power? Her current exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Abattoir! U.S.A., takes up the history of the slaughterhouse and broader relationships between race, technology, and form.
In conversation for the first time, the artists will discuss a range of topics, illuminating the ways in which video—and its transmission everywhere, all the time—creates meaning. The discussion will be moderated by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture.