Tiffany Sia: Overt Listening

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Austria by Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong). Curated by Carina Bukuts, Overt Listening brings together footage from the artist’s first feature length film, shot across Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands, with a series of newly commissioned video works and sculptures. Unfolding across the ground floor of Kunsthalle Wien’s Museumsquartier building and the Studio on Level−1, the exhibition examines how histories of conflict are made public, circulated and withheld through the cameras, broadcasts and military infrastructure that govern what can be seen and heard.

An artist, filmmaker and writer, Sia advances arguments through form, commenting on the relationship between media, political power and collective memory. Overt Listening (2026) takes as its subject the Kinmen Islands in Taiwan, situated just a few kilometres off the Chinese coast. The Chinese Civil War—which Sia makes the case is unresolved since the 1949 Battle of Guningtou—and the Cold War continue to shape everyday life on the islands. Moving between military bunkers, museum displays and deserted coastlines, the film brings together oral and official histories, employing on-screen text instead of voiceover and paying particular attention to the sounds through which political conflicts continue to resonate.

Rather than transferring the film into the black box, Sia reconsiders its material through the different temporal conditions of cinema and the museum: Whereas a film screening unfolds over a predetermined duration, an exhibition allows visitors to encounter moving images at different moments and in varying sequences. At Kunsthalle Wien, footage from the feature film is presented alongside new works, arranged as overlapping loops of different lengths. Drawing on her early training under concert musicians across Western and Chinese traditions, Sia approaches the exhibition as an eight-hour score spanning the institution’s standard opening hours. Composed as works that unfold as different rhythms between sound and image, the exhibition is experienced differently depending on how visitors move through the space.

While Sia states that “the exhibition is not a mere copy of the film,” several new works draw on footage from Overt Listening. In Carsick (2026), a camera circles roundabouts on Kinmen, passing monuments of political figures, camouflaged bunkers and military structures that have become part of the everyday landscape while the overtones of popular songs recorded from the radio form an eerie, voice-like hum. The video Nothing Really Happens (2026) turns to sustained observation. Left with their original sound, long takes of empty beachfronts, tanks emerging at dawn and a former broadcast wall are held until an ordinary view, such as an empty beach, begins to read as a defended coastline. Together, the works offer an idiosyncratic account of the Cold War through sound and silence, exploring how unresolved conflicts persist within the ordinary.

For the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Tiffany Sia developed a new work that brings these reflections to the Austrian context. Permanent Vanishing Point (an Austrian Road Movie) (2026) takes Austria’s permanent neutrality, declared in 1955, as its point of departure. Two recordings of journeys towards the Brenner Pass, on the border between Austria and Italy, are projected onto either side of a screen from opposite directions. Filmed without cuts, neither journey reaches its destination. Crossing a country that held its position between the Western and Soviet blocs through the Cold War, both drives remain in perpetual approach. The projections are accompanied by an asynchronous eight-hour field recording from two Viennese parks, Arenbergpark and Augarten, where flak towers built during the Second World War remain embedded in everyday life. By bringing together these journeys and the sounds of Vienna, Sia returns to a concern that also runs through her works on Kinmen and extends its logic: how histories of conflict remain built into contemporary landscapes and neutrality itself becomes operational.

Other works in the exhibition extend these concerns to the apparatuses through which images and information are produced, transmitted and received. Doubles (2026) places a stage marker at the centre of the frame of a working surveillance camera, positioning visitors simultaneously as observers and recorded subjects. In the Studio on Level−1, Spider’s Cinema (2026) presents an eight-hour recording of a livestream, its lens obscured by a spider’s web that remains barely visible in the darkness of the night. Both works draw attention to cameras that record continuously, regardless of whether anyone is watching, and to the intersection of surveillance and the act of observation. Turning from camera to voice, Playback (2026) runs a commentary about the absence of a voiceover across a surtitle bar. Plot Holes (2026–ongoing), uses teleprompters to present excerpts from broadcasts that intersect with political events. Sia refers to the airing of Swan Lake on Soviet television during the attempted coup in 1991 as well as Wag the Dog (1997) during NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. These are combined with footage from the secret trial of Chinese military commander Xu Qinxian—recently leaked amid a purge of China’s military leadership—who refused to deploy troops against protesters in Beijing in 1989. The series examines how images can obscure political realities or unexpectedly bring them to light, revealing gaps in official narratives.

Tiffany Sia’s film Overt Listening is co-produced by Kunsthalle Wien and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) has held solo exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (2025) and Artists Space, New York (2021). In 2024 she was awarded the Baloise Art Prize, for which she received an exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg (2025). Her work has also been exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York; Museum Brandhorst, Munich (both 2026); CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2025); Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2023); Seoul Museum of Art and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (both 2022). Sia’s debut feature length film Overt Listening world premiered at the New York Film Festival (2026). Her films have been screened at numerous festivals including the Glasgow Short Film Festival (2026), Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2025), MoMA Doc Fortnight (2024 and 2020), the Toronto International Film Festival (2024 and 2022) and the New York Film Festival (2022 and 2021). She received the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award in 2021 and is the author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024). Sia lives and works in New York.

Kunsthalle Wien is financed by the Magistratsabteilung Kultur der Stadt Wien (MA 7). The artistic programme is also supported by the members of the Kunsthalle Wien Club. Free admission to the exhibition on every last Sunday of the month is made possible with the support of Dorotheum. Tiffany Sia’s stay in Vienna was hosted by PART International Art Residency Austria.

Forthcoming
Magali Reus: Tenant (November 27, 2026 until May 2, 2027) / Kunsthalle Wien Preis 2026: Lotti Brockmann & Valentino Skarwan (December 3, 2026 until February 7, 2027)