Tiffany Sia: On and Off-Screen Imaginaries

Primary Information, 2024, Softcover, 208 pages, 18 × 11 cm

This collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia gathers six essays that offer a framework for an exilic, fugitive cinema. Sia addresses geopolitics in cinema, image circulation, and national imaginaries, highlighting the stakes of deterritorializing the discursive formation of new media and film practices and making the case for the continued relevance of cinema in an era of networked images and screen ubiquity.

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. As a practitioner and thinker, Sia has been at the forefront of a new generation of filmmakers working with new vernacular media to trace and comment on social unrest and political crackdowns. Drawing from personal experience and historical study, the essays in this volume offer urgent reflections on a cultural landscape changed by national-security policies, shadow bureaucracies, censorship, and surveillance.