Tiffany Sia Overt Listening

Kunsthalle Wien presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Austria by Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong). Overt Listening is centred around a new film which takes as its subject the Kinmen Islands in Taiwan, just a few kilometres off the Chinese coast. Situated at the frontline of one of the world’s longest unresolved geopolitical conflicts, the islands have remained a site of strategic tension since the Chinese Civil War, where the afterlives of the Cold War continue to shape everyday life. Conceived as a spatial installation unfolding across the ground floor of Kunsthalle Wien’s Museumsquartier spaces, the exhibition brings together a series of newly conceived works that explore how histories of conflict resonate through landscapes, infrastructures, media and systems of communication.

Unfolding across a series of interconnected chapters, Overt Listening moves between military bunkers, museum displays and deserted coastlines, interweaving landscapes with the sound of radio broadcasts and military exercises. Together, these fragments form a cinematic essay that traces the material and psychological legacies of geopolitical conflict. The film is accompanied by a series of newly conceived video works and installations that expand Sia’s inquiry into the infrastructures of surveillance, transit and broadcast media. One work reflects on Austrian neutrality through the material traces the Cold War embedded in the contemporary landscape, particularly its Flak towers – massive reinforced-concrete structures built as anti-aircraft defence and civilian shelters during the Second World War.

Drawing on historical research, archival footage, field recordings and sound, Sia’s works examine how histories are constructed, circulated and remembered. Instead of presenting history as something complete and resolved, the exhibition asks how it continues to shape the ways we see, remember and inhabit the present.