Interview with Tiffany Sia about her exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, entitled Phantasmatic Screens.

Tiffany Sia, you are currently the subject of a wonderful exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg. Could you briefly introduce yourself and share your background with those who may not yet be familiar with your work here?

I am an artist, filmmaker and writer. My work spans printed matter to film and video, and I’m interested in how material culture – from paper to screen – shapes and informs our perceptions of place, power and historical memory. 

Could you please introduce the works you have selected for this exhibition and explain why you chose them?

The Sojourn (2023) and Antipodes III (2024)are works that demonstrate my interest in screen culture, from the cinema to video culture that surrounds our lives every day. I’m interested in presenting these works as ways to frame questions about our perceptions and myths about place, and how screen culture shapes public imaginaries.

I would like to talk about what went on behind the scenes of the exhibition. How was it conceived and brought to life, and what aspects did you discuss with the curator, Marie-Noëlle Farcy?

The exhibition was originally conceived with Felix Gaudlitz for Art Basel Statements. Part of the honor of winning the Baloise Art Prize in 2024 was a solo show with Mudam. Last fall, I completed a site visit and met with Marie-Noëlle Farcy and Vanessa Lecomte to plan how the exhibition of two works would come to life in the museum. I collaborated with them closely on its realisation as an installation in the space.

In your artistic practice, you make extensive use of the medium of film, but in unexpected and paradoxical ways. Your approach seems spectral and haunting, particularly in exploring the perceptual gaps between past and present. Is it because of film’s ability to depict time and spatialise duration that you chose cinema over other techniques?

Cinema in its ability to spatialise duration and to depict time, is the most direct way to formally address memory, both on a personal and collective scale. I’m also interested in film, because it is an incredibly high-stakes medium and highly politicising. So much of what we watch every day informs and shapes us, as well as our relationship to the world. And while books have historically been the target material of censorship and banning, more and more in our age, film and video have become the contested material terrain that is of great interest to the state.

Your work often engages with the Cold War and histories of exile. How do you navigate the tension between personal experience and broader historical narratives in your films?

I’m much more interested in art’s discursive role, than in its personal or biographical meaning. The aesthetic mode of my work is not simply about denouncing any regime ­– my work addresses political memory and its violent erasures as multiple and overlapping. This is the heart of my provocation and concept addressed in my book On and Off-Screen Imaginaries – the notion of the “No Place”. I am a comparativist by nature, and my work asks for a reading beyond easy Cold War clichés. Regimes of impunity and authoritarian power exist both today and in the past, and there is an urgency for us to see this reality in Euro-American contexts too. As an artist interested in the relationship between aesthetics and contested political histories, it is essential to point toward an understanding that there are many models of fascism and authoritarianism – past and present – from which we can learn.

In The Sojourn, you reference King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967). What drew you to this particular film, and how does it relate to the themes you explore in your own work? 

King Hu’s Dragon Inn is one of the monumental achievements of twentieth-century cinema, even though it does not receive nearly the attention it deserves among global cinephiles or in film studies curricula today. Without responding in a personal register, I prefer to address this, as I do in the rest of my work, through an aesthetic and interpretive register. I became interested in reading the canon of Sinophone cinema through an exilic perspective – recognising that some of the most significant works that define Sinophone cinema, like King Hu’s Dragon Inn, were oblique ways of addressing the aftermaths of seismic political shifts. I am interested in how exilic memory becomes a way to reframe and inconvenience sanctioned, national memory.

You are also the author of a book, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (2024), which you describe as a “montage on paper”. You seem particularly interested in the application of cinematic principles to other media, such as projecting a film onto a crumpled curtain. Could you elaborate on this aspect of your approach in relation to the exhibition at Mudam ?

My background is in film studies and film theory, which strongly inform my work and thinking. While my work is shown in museums and art spaces, it is also shown in cinemas, such as microcinemas or film festivals. The cinematic context and an art museum context are different. They are discursively separate, as they formally demand distinct approaches and forms of attention from the viewer. 

On September 27, you presented your short film A Child Already Knows (2024), in which you draw on archives from the Mao era and contrast them with the perspective of a child confronted with the adult world. Could you tell us about your approach to making this film?

A Child Already Knows (2024) was made at the heart of my exhibition Technical Difficulties, shown in New York at Maxwell Graham last year. I was interested in how the child, as subject or protagonist in film, is often instrumentalised in moral tales and cinema. For A Child Already Knows, I focused on children as ambiguous narrators – what they perceive that adults refuse to acknowledge. I edited the film as a montage of text against appropriating early Mao-era animations, formalistically apart from reenactment. Using a child’s recollection and revelation of the world’s violence became an important way for me to illustrate a scene in a very confusing and highly contested period of history. I was thinking of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveler (1974), Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), or Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974). Some may wonder why I made this film in 2024. As a comparativist, I offer the film as a means of addressing the interminable twilight of the Cold War and its residues. What the child protagonist remembers inconveniences how we tell history and its messiness. And what we still do not want to admit or show of our national pasts. These questions are universal. 

You won the Art Basel Prize 2024. What does this award mean to you ?

This is my first major award, and it’s very meaningful for me. In my work, I attempt to ask very complex questions, refusing to simplify the work’s formal and conceptual concerns ­– so it’s not only an honour, but also encouraging to get this kind of recognition to keep the work demanding. Financially, the award has also enabled me to continue my work and start new, more ambitious productions. 

Finally, could you tell us about the projects you are currently working on ?
I am currently working on my first feature-length film, Overt Listening. It’s a landscape film and – continuing with themes from The Sojourn, shown at Mudam ­– it is all about playing with the use of sound to unsettle the sublime landscape image. My new film work attempts to think more extensively about the political presence of sound, of silence, and with the use of music as sonic propaganda. Similar to Antipodes III, it is shot in the archipelago of Kinmen. As always, I’m also working on new writing: a forthcoming artist book to be published by No Place Press, as well as some essays in upcoming anthologies that are to be announced. 

Tiffany Sia: Phantasmatic Screens, 29 August 2025 – 11 January 2026, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, www.mudam.com