Decision Moment. III: Erasure that Persists

Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Erasure that Persists, the third program in the four-part series Decision Moment, presenting artists' films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.

At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.

Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.

III: Erasure that PersistsTuesday, July 22, 2025, 8:30pmApproaching traumatic experiences as refrains that persistently shape personal identities, these films by Tiffany Sia and Iva Radivojević speak through media (television and telephone) in search of new ways for grappling with historical events that have stripped away individual agency. Both works employ cinematic form as a means to contend with memory’s inherent elusiveness, incompleteness, and resistance to being fully transmitted or resolved across generations.

Tiffany Sia, A Child Already Knows (2024, United States, 32 minutes)A child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same period. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make. The child becomes increasingly aware of the world of adult secrets. A television is flickering. Train sounds whir.

Iva Radivojević, When the Phone Rang (Serbia/USA, 2024, 73 minutes)Structured through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, Radivojević’s film excavates the residue of childhood memories shaped by the moment of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its psychological aftermath. In the protagonist's eleven-year-old mind the phone call erases her entire country, history, and identity. Through a mix of scripted performative recreations When the Phone Rang does not return to the past, instead confronting the impossibility of ever having left it.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Sia's films have screened at MoMA Documentary Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Open City Documentary Film Festival, and elsewhere. Her first institutional solo show Slippery When Wet at Artists Space proposed the concept of a wet ontology of Hong Kong. Sia has also shown at Seoul Museum of Art, and at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf, among other venues. She is the author of Too Salty Too Wet (2021) and her writing has appeared in October, Film Quarterly, LUX Moving Image, and elsewhere.

Iva Radivojević was born in Belgrade and spent her early years in Yugoslavia, Cyprus and New York City. She is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between Athens and Lesbos. Her work presents itself as a collection of fragments {observations, poetry, images, sounds, melodies, languages} which collage together to connect into a ruminating whole. The work circles around dislocation, migration and belonging, seeking to connect to the metaphysical or the magical. Iva's films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam IFF, Jeonju iFF, CPH:DOX, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, DocLisboa, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), and were commissioned byARTE La Lucarne and Field of Vision. She is the recipient of the Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, Jerome Foundation Fellowship, Princess Grace Special Project Award and Film Fellowship. She is a PhD candidate at Villa Arson in Nice, France. Her new film When The Phone Rang received the Special Mention Award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival and continues to win awards worldwide. A book of the original story by the same name was published by red herring press in the UK.

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In case of rain, the event will take place in our indoor Screening Room.

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