Tiffany Sia presents “They Prefer Us When We’re Dead,” a lecture drawn from a forthcoming essay of the same title, the first articulation of a book-length project now in progress with no place press, that locates law as the apparatus of video as form. Where materialist film theory has long located cinema’s anti-illusionist properties in light, celluloid, and sound, Sia insists that censorship, copyright, contract law, and national security and anti-terrorism laws constitute video’s most consequential material substrate, shaping how images circulate, survive, and are acquired. Moving through her own overlapping positions as author, contractor, seller, rights holder, and public figure, Sia traces more broadly how different applications of the law structure risk and value unevenly across film and art contexts, and across jurisdictions. This talk advances a polemic that the dead are law’s most convenient material. They cannot testify, contradict, or resist their legal transformation. Political agency must therefore also account for its negation: being acted upon against one’s will, being prevented from acting, and being denied the capacity to act. This talk argues against a nostalgia for form within materialist film theory––and against the transcendent viewer that such nostalgia assumes––insisting instead on the image’s profound situatedness. Through a legal materialist framework, the medium’s ontology spells out a theory of its violence.
Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong; lives and works in New York) is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her debut feature film, Overt Listening (2026), premiered at the New York Film Festival. Her solo exhibition of the same title opens at Kunsthalle Wien on Thursday, 12 November 2026 and runs through 24 January 2027. Rather than transposing the film into the gallery, the exhibition reworks its material into a spatial score, attending to the infrastructure of listening and containment that the feature assembles through montage.