Led by artists and filmmakers Jordan Lord and Tiffany Sia, this media literacy lab accompanies Lord’s exhibition “Narrative Warfare” and Sia’s film ‘Do Not Circulate’ (2022) and continues an ongoing project developed in Lord’s practice in collaboration with Sia. The session asks how we might reframe questions of media literacy—or how to read audiovisual media—in the face of propaganda, censorship, disinformation, and the ongoing mediation of conflict, drawing on questions that have animated their shared work: how narratives are constructed, weaponised, and contested across documentary, news media, and state-produced imagery, and what it means to read these forms under conditions in which the production of reality itself is at stake.
Starting from the notion that access practices such as audio description and captioning are themselves forms of reading, we will consider how access is both a precondition and means of media literacy. We will examine how state powers mediate access to audiovisual documents of violence, including those that nation-states produce and circulate as instruments of domination—from broadcast propaganda to footage withheld, manipulated, or selectively released. Understanding access and acts of reading media as partial and positional, we will consider what transpires outside regimes of the visible and audible, including what we still need to imagine. The session also draws on questions animating Sia’s forthcoming feature ‘Overt Listening’, which extends this inquiry into Cold War surveillance infrastructure and the politics of what remains inaudible.
What to expect:
This online event will take place on Zoom on Sunday 24 May from 2pm to 4pm BST
Free, booking required via Eventbrite
This is a participatory workshop. Attendees will be invited to contribute to discussion throughout the session
Live captioning and BSL interpretation are available upon request. Please contact [email protected] by Monday 19 May 2026
Artist Biographies
Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts; framing and support; access, disability, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including New York Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Walker Art Center, Union Docs, and Dokufest. Their film Shared Resources (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys, Artists Space, and Squeaky Wheel. Their work has been featured in publications such as Screen Slate, Filmmaker Magazine, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic.
Tiffany Sia (b. 1988) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. The artist and filmmaker’s work 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. Sia currently lives and works in New York. Sia is pronounced SHä (as 謝 in Shanghainese).
Access Information
Live captioning and BSL interpretation are available upon request. Please contact [email protected] by Monday 19 May 2026
