Wednesday, September 16, 2020; 6pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
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Tiffany Sia wrote Salty Wet last year, in which she claims, “Hong Kong is the first postmodern city to die.” A subversive text disguised as a Hong Kong softcore porn magazine from 1989, the zine challenges the potential of solidarity from afar. In this webinar, Sia proposes that bearing witness is the least–and sometimes the most–we can do in times of crisis. Invested in mutual aid as the material choreography of political critique, she will discuss the generative potentials of care and solidarity, from creating folk infrastructures to the importance of developing political and cross-cultural literacy. The webinar will also touch upon the limits and fissures of political visibility. When does watching become voyeuristic, paternalistic or entangled with virtue signaling? Sia will be “leaking” parts of the forthcoming Too Salty Too Wet, weaving readings into the talk as a kind of “live” transmission from Hong Kong, through which she continues to critique the precarious politics of the “faraway.”
Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, independent film producer and founder of Speculative Place. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet. The first volume was published as a chapbook in 2019 by Inpatient Press. 咸濕 Salty Wet is in Tai Kwun Contemporary's Artists' Book Library collection and Asia Art Archive as part of the collection of print materials made in response to the Hong Kong protests. Sia directed Never Rest/Unrest, a short experimental film that takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” on the potential for anti-colonial filmmaking, resisting spectacular documentary and news narratives. She is part of Home Cooking, founded by Asad Raza, on which she contributes Hell is a Timeline. The series are performances and readings intended to provoke a materialist reckoning with our digital and real timelines.
The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?
Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.
