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Never Rest/Unrest

Tiffany Sia

2020 00:28:32 Hong Kong SAR ChinaChinese, EnglishColorStereo16:9Video
Tags:
Activism, City, Crime or Violence, Documentary, Politics, State, The, Surveillance

Description

Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist's practice of scaling oral history, utilizing the vertical 16:9 aspect ratio as a vernacular form. Never Rest/Unrest takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa's "Imperfect Cinema" on the potential for filmmaking that aims towards an urgent, process-driven cinema. Dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism are resisted. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time. Subtitles are intentionally omitted as a means of interrogating the cultural proximity or distance of the viewer from Hong Kong.

English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

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.