When Tiffany Sia received the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2024, it validated a practice that refuses easy categories. The Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist and filmmaker creates work that functions as political documentation, aesthetic experience, and meditation on power simultaneously.
The Artist: Witness and Weaver
Sia's background spans filmmaking and visual art, and her work occupies the territory between. Presented by Felix Gaudlitz Gallery in Vienna, she brings documentary impulses to fine art contexts without sacrificing either rigor. Her subjects – militarized landscapes, Cold War legacies, surveillance technologies – demand careful attention.
The Work: Found Footage, Lost Histories
Her Art Basel presentation, "Antipodes III" (2024), featured found footage forming a 24-hour panorama from a militarized site in Kinmen – an island caught between China and Taiwan, between past and present, between visibility and erasure. The work doesn't explain; it shows. "The Sojourn" (2023) retraces the steps of director King Hu, adding layers of cinematic history.
The Breakthrough: Baloise and MUDAM
The prize, worth CHF 30,000, includes acquisition by MUDAM Luxembourg through the Baloise donation. For an artist working with politically charged content, institutional support provides crucial platform and protection.
Why Now? Watching the Watchers
As surveillance technologies proliferate and geopolitical tensions intensify, Sia's attention to militarized landscapes feels urgently necessary. Her work makes visible what power prefers to hide.
Conclusion: Art as Evidence
Tiffany Sia represents a practice where aesthetics and politics are inseparable. Her Baloise Prize signals that such work can find its audience and its place in major collections.