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A Wet Finger in the Air

Tiffany Sia

2021 01:00:17 Hong Kong SAR China, United StatesChinese, EnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

A Wet Finger in the Air, a single-channel video, assembles appropriated footage of bilingual weather reports from 1980’s through 1997-era Hong Kong TVB and Pearl broadcasting stations into a hypnotic, randomized loop that repeats every hour. While these reels may invoke a kind of nostalgia, Sia's interest centers more on locating atmospheric and weather changes as a metaphor for the similarly unpredictable and slippery turns of history. The artist metaphorically raises a wet finger in the air to judge the invisible direction of the times.

English and Cantonese.

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