---
title: "Klasse Prof. Armin Linke | They Prefer Us When We\'re Dead"
date: 2026-05-05
author: "Julia Viehweg"
intro_image: "https://www.adbk.de/images/stories/aktuell/2026/05/TS_MGSolo_2024_02%20Kopie.jpg"
fulltext_image: "https://www.adbk.de/images/stories/aktuell/2026/05/TS_MGSolo_2024_02%20Kopie.jpg"
categories:
  - name: "Archiv (Aktuell)"
    url: "https://www.adbk.de/archiv-aktuell.md"
---

# Klasse Prof. Armin Linke | They Prefer Us When We're Dead

![Klasse Prof. Armin Linke | They Prefer Us When We\'re Dead](https://www.adbk.de/images/stories/aktuell/2026/05/TS_MGSolo_2024_02%20Kopie.jpg)

 

 "Tiffany Sia presents *They Prefer Us When We're Dead*, a talk drawn from a forthcoming essay 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 prefigures a theory of its violence.

  

 Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) challenges genre, working across a range of forms—including film, video sculpture, artist books, scholarly essays, and more—Sia blends nonfiction with prose and theoretical inquiry. Her practice centers on the struggle of visual and linguistic representation, historical periodization and geography, and the limitations of official records. She examines how material culture and media culture (with focus on print and film/video) functions as both a record and mechanism of governance, power, and perception. Her work questions how such structures give rise to imagined geographies, particularly those of contested or non-normative political entities and territories. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and elsewhere. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and The Mudam, Luxembourg. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Argo Factory: Pejman Foundation, Tehran; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and elsewhere. Sia is the author of *On and Off-Screen Imaginaries* (Primary Information, 2024), a compendium of essays that makes a case for fugitive, exilic cinema, moving beyond national identity and the politics of place as a critical lens."


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**Raumnummer (Studienwerkstatt):** {"indoorlocation":"","roomsign":"","description":""}

**Künstlerinnen (m/w/d):** Tiffany Sia | Vortrag

**Datum & Uhrzeit:** 2026-05-11 17:00:22

**Ort:**  Akademie der Bildenden Künste München | Akademiestr. 4

**Raum:** Neubau | Auditorium | E.EG.28

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