Art Basel Statements 2024

Tiffany Sia has been awarded the 25th Baloise Art Prize.

As an artist and filmmaker, Tiffany Sia’s work begins from a process of writing. Through her filmmaking and installation works, she uses these mediums to vivify her conceptual explorations on the politics and relations of media circulation and considers how material cultures—particularly print and film/video—trace and enable power, governance, and perception of place.

For Art Basel Statements 2024, Sia will present The Sojourn, a video installation consisting of three elements: a book, a video-sculpture, and a film. On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, published by Primary Information (2024), gathers a first collection of six essays by the artist that offer a framework for an exilic, fugitive cinema. An essential counterpart to Sia’s films and artworks, this volume is a critical intervention into global film studies, the politics of film/photographic practices, and experimental approaches to documentary.

Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn (2023) imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He advises on the perfect conditions of mist and weather. Yet, in the journey through the mountains of Hehuanshan, the sublime landscape of King Hu remains ever elusive. Sia later visits the elementary school of Indigenous filmmaker and principal Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the center of the frame as a mode of translation, sometimes refusing total disclosure. The work constructed as video sculpture is projected against a readymade folding screen and at Art Basel, surrounded by cinema curtains. Probing the ways institutions show landscape art that serve to often codify a national imaginary of space and territory, The Sojourn distorts and defamiliarizes the landscape form as both moving image and object.

Sia’s new video sculpture Antipodes III continues a series of works that use rearview mirrors, twisting a line from media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s rear-view-mirror-effect. “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future,” McLuhan once observed. A rearview mirror, suspended in space from the ceiling, is angled and adjacent to the curtains of the film. The work features a recording of a live-stream shown on the mirror, typically used as a back-up cam in a car. Antipodes III is part of an ongoing body of work using a rearview mirror as an intimate viewing experience of sublime and contested landscapes, offering reflection on distance, affect and geopolitics.


Art Basel Statements 2024
Presenting Tiffany Sia
Booth M14, Hall 2.1 
13. – 16. 6. 2024


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