Breathing Cameras: Tiffany Sia

Tiffany Sia in Conversation with Andrea Lissoni

Tiffany Sia, Never Rest/Unrest (still), 2020. Courtesy the artist.

Introduced by Andrea Lissoni as “an apparition,” Tiffany Sia’s short experimental film Never Rest/Unrest (2020)—shown, among other works, in Slippery When Wet, the artist’s latest solo in the United States, at Artists Space, New York (2021)—was, in her own words, “just made.” Shot “obsessively” on her phone only, with no script and without a crew, the work documents the relentless timeline of the protests that blistered in Hong Kong from June to December 2019. The ensuing conversation describes Never Rest/Unrest as a way of filming that posits a counter-spectacular narrative, rethinks the ethics of documentation writ large, and challenges typical distribution models. What transpires—through the embodiment of time in bodies, and Sia’s “breathing eye” behind the camera—is a series of in-between cinematic spaces where news and information indulge as quintessentially quiet, but incredibly seismic.

ANDREA LISSONI There is something beautiful in not assigning a specific, defined shape to your work. Like, it is something, but it looks also like something else, so it could be always something else. Here comes the challenge I’d like to propose for our conversation: we could try to only focus on Never Rest/Unrest (2020).

TIFFANY SIA I’d love that.

ANDREA Never Rest/Unrest is an apparition. It appears, scrolls, evolves, revolves, and transpires. Slippery When Wet, your solo show at Artists Space, New York, seems to me both its sweat and its blueprint. In its online manifestation, it hosted a screening of Never Rest/Unrest, and in its real-life form it was traversed by a cinematic vertical roll that recalls both a script for film—printed by a dot-matrix printer—and analog film itself, being a continuous sheet perforated at the edges, as actual film is (or would have been). You found a wonderful mirrored cinematic device: it runs throughout the stairwell beginning in the galleries, and therefore cannot be read in its entirety. Yet one can experience it online by scrolling down, actually recalling the paradox of cinematic movement. Something chemically impressed and impossible to be read—a film—runs vertically through a projector, becomes light, lands on a wall, and generates communication, a form of reading, belief, and disbelief...READ MORE