Tiffany Sia

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. In her practice, she questions the boundaries of genres and works with film, video sculptures, artists’ books, and scholarly essays, among other media. She focuses on the challenges of visual and linguistic representation, historical periodization, and geographic ordering, as well as the limits of official records. She examines how material culture and media culture — with an emphasis on print media as well as film and video — function both as sources of documentation and as mechanisms of domination, power, and perception. Her work also explores how such formats contribute to the formation of imaginary geographies, particularly in the context of contested or non-normative political entities and territories.

Antipodes II is part of a series in which Sia takes up the motif of the rear-view mirror as a sculptural element. She installs it suspended from the ceiling and modifies it so that it evokes the view through a periscope. Inside it, a screen is installed showing a 24-hour live-stream video from the port of Okinawa. In Antipodes II, the artist addresses the tension between the Pacific region’s landscapes, which are at once striking and highly contested. In doing so, Sia creates a situational embedding within power, history, and perception. The fragments she employs — used with temporal displacement — play a key role, producing an affective rather than a narrative meaning.

By refusing narrative readability, Sia’s works also call into question the idea of a stable system of meaning. Perception appears here as always context-dependent, and reality is not understood as a given unity but rather as an effect of medial and symbolic orders. Accordingly, the artist works less with clear, linear narratives than with moods that guide perception in a particular direction without determining it unambiguously. This more atmospheric approach directs attention and structures experience.

Antipodes II, 2024
Rewired rear-view mirror with recorded live-stream video of the port Okinawa for a duration of 24 hours
26 × 7,5 × 9 cm
Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham, New York