Screening and Talk with Tiffany Sia: You Had Become Aware of the World of Adult Secrets

How are (hi)stories told that resist official narratives—and what can cinema hold, and what can it not?

The evening opens with a screening of “A Child Already Knows” (2024), Tiffany Sia’s most recent short film. The work appropriates animation footage from the early Mao era alongside the testimony of a child coming into awareness of adult secrets during a time of intense political uncertainty. In her subsequent artist talk—her first in Germany—Sia traces the figure of the child as a method for telling difficult, contested histories marked by shame, disavowal, and political complexity. Drawing on film, literature, psychoanalysis, and documentary theory, she develops a framework for how the child’s suspended, pre-ideological perspective opens space for stories that no nation wants to claim.

The event takes place in the context of the exhibition “Carrying,” in which four video works from Sia’s “Scroll Figures” series are presented in a window connecting the museum's interior with public space—including two new works conceived specifically for the exhibition.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer currently based in New York. Her films have screened at New York Film Festival, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, among other festivals. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg; and her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art; and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Sia is the author of “On and Off-Screen Imaginaries” (Primary Information, 2024) and was the recipient of the Baloise Art Prize in 2024.