Slippery When Wet. February 17 – May 1, 2021. Artists Space, New York. Curated by Jay Sanders and Stella Cilman.
Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet. Installation view, Artists Space, 2021. Courtesy Artists Space, New York. Photo: Filip Wolak
Artists Space is pleased to present Tiffany Sia's first institutional exhibition, on view in bifurcated forms in our 11 Cortlandt Alley space and online, to allow for greater access to the geographically-dispersed community of Hong Kongers throughout the world.
Slippery When Wet proposes a wet ontology of Hong Kong—a city in ongoing transfiguration shifting into an uncanny vision of itself. Hong Kong secretes, leaving a trail of ink, tears, humidity, logistic flows, and leaks. The works herein usurp these fraught channels to make the shortest distance between two places: between New York and Hong Kong; between Artists Space and Speculative Place (the artist’s residency program and project space on Lamma Island). Within the installation, an obsessive material accumulation suggests spectatorship, reading, and viewing as discursive sites between geographies.
Emanating from the newly published Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, these works on paper and in moving image propose a poetics through a multitude of temporal frames. Across a series of ten THREADS, they wrestle with the slipperiness of the original place as it recedes into the imaginary: An image of the Hong Kong skyline flickers as a projection in a lounge space. From March 14–20th, a weeklong, episodic live-streamed landscape film broadcasts both at Artists Space and online, marking the changeover to daylight savings when New York and Hong Kong are in exact antipodes in timezone. A row of books serves as the show’s vertebrae, and sits as a mirrored barrier on a shelf, slowly disappearing over time. A three-channel video cycles through archival weather reports. Humidity accumulates on the windows. A blank scroll precariously blows in the vestibule. One scrolls through a seemingly endless, and authorized, full leak of Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕 on dot-matrix paper.
The haptics of moving images and paper precipitate, tracing a slippery outline of relations, timelines, and place. Sia asks, "How can I dig your way to Hong Kong?"
Damman, Catherine. "Lust, Caution: Catherine Damman on Tiffany Sia’s “Slippery When Wet.” Artforum, Summer Issue 2021. In print and online.
Ugelvig, Jeppe. Sia, Tiffany. "Writing a History of Hong Kong with Tears" Frieze, March 3, 2021.
Yim, Polly. "Breathing in The Invisible: Polly Yim on Tiffany Sia at Artists Space, New York.” Texte zur Kunst, April 9, 2021.
Lissoni, Andrea. Sia, Tiffany. “'Breathing Cameras: Tiffany Sia,' Tiffany Sia in Conversation with Andrea Lissoni." Mousse Magazine, Spring 2021.
Bovino, Emily Verla, "Slippery When Wet: Tiffany Sia's Poetry of Lived Time." Ocula, February 24, 2021.
Klett, Maddie. “Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2021.
Cheung, Karen. “Belonging Nearby” Open Space, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 31, 2021.
Ling, Isabel. “Wielding Time and Text, Tiffany Sia Documents Hong Kong’s Resistance” by Isabel Ling. Hyperallergic, April 13, 2021.