Tiffany Sia wins Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel

Tiffany Sia, the Hong Kong-born New York-based artist and filmmaker, has received the Baloise Art Prize for her outstanding contributions to the fields of moving image art. Sia was selected from a list of 18 nominees, with her two installations The Sojourn and Antipodes II as presented by the gallery Felix Gaudlitz swaying the jury's decision.

Baloise Art Prize was established in 1994 by the Swiss insurance company Baloise in cooperation with Art Basel as part of its initiative to support emerging artists in their creative endeavors. The prize includes a CHF 30,000 (USD $33,400) monetary award and is presented to a participant in the Statements section of the art fair. The other winner of the prize is Norwegian-Sudanese visual artist Ahmed Umar.

In The Sojourn, Sia follows in the footsteps of the martial arts film director King Hu, overlaying text onto shots of the Taiwanese landscape, eliciting from viewers the notion of what Salman Rushdie called the “imaginary homeland”, i.e. a romanticized view that immigrants in the diaspora have of their homeland. The installation was previously shown at Fondazione Prada in Milan.

In Antipodes II, Sia features a live stream of the port of Okinawa recorded over a duration of 24 hours and projected onto a rearview mirror. The work is currently on view in Sia's solo exhibition at Maxwell Graham in New York.

Tiffany Sia is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores how material culture enables and supports structures of governance, geopolitical power and perception. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Artists Space in New York, Seoul Museum of Art and other spaces. For more information about Sia winning the Baloise Art Prize check their site here.