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Do Not Circulate

Tiffany Sia

2021 00:16:41 Hong Kong SAR ChinaChinese, EnglishColorStereo16:9Video
Tags:
Activism , City , Crime or Violence , Documentary , Media Analysis , Politics , State, The

Description

Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation.

This film contains footage, descriptions and acts that may constitute criminal offenses under prevailing laws. The following offense-related material is meant for documentary purposes only. All rights reserved to respective copyright owners. The archival footage spans a single news event in Hong Kong, weaving a violent timeline in roughly the order that the materials were published online, including anonymously uploaded videos from Twitter and internet forums, allegedly leaked audio and news reportage––much of which has since been erased, disavowed or forgotten. A digital media trail teeters between the seeable and unseeable, deception and truth, conjuring ghosts and occult forces on the timeline.

English and Cantonese.

Available for educational use. Please contact VDB for exhibition and screening requests.

About Tiffany Sia

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer born in Hong Kong and currently living in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. The artist and filmmaker has previously had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Film Quarterly, October, and LUX Moving Image. Her first collection of essays, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, was published by Primary Information in 2024. In 2024, Sia was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize, and in 2022, the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award. The artist and filmmaker’s work at its core challenges genre. Working across mediums, Sia’s multidisciplinary practice materializes across multiple forms from films, video sculptures, artist books, scholarly essays and more. Her work blends nonfiction with poetics and theoretical inquiry, and her visual explorations confront questions about representation of place and memory. Sia’s ongoing conceptual occupation lies within the struggle to represent historical time, geography and the limits of official records.