Alison Nguyen
Prior Occupants still

Sept 8, 2026 at 7pm
Artist Talk and Special Screening
The High Line at 14th Street.

Film will be shown at the HIgh Line through Nov 16, 2026

Free
RSVP HERE
Alison Nguyen’s compelling new film for High Line Originals, co-commissioned with CHANEL Culture Fund, explores the obscure nuclear history of Westbeth Artist Housing’s building—the former headquarters for Bell Laboratories, a research facility tied to the development of communication technologies and, later, the atomic bomb.

Inspired by a severed fragment of the original High Line freight rail left embedded in Westbeth’s facade, and the High Line’s own history of transformation, Nguyen reflects on the historical narratives that persist—and those quietly erased—within sites of adaptive reuse.

Long before Westbeth’s conversion into a historic public housing community for artists in 1970, the site was occupied by Western Electric and later Bell Labs—a crucible of innovation where critical cinema, telecommunications, and military technologies were researched, including components later used in the development of the atomic bomb.

Prior Occupants is an assemblage of audiovisual material including sculpturally re-filmed archival documents, choreographed performance sequences, and layered fragments of audio interviews with the very residents and architects who have shaped Westbeth and the High Line. Through this collage of voices and textures, the artist explores individual and collective relationships to place, technological acceleration, and mortality, and foregrounds the ways in which the structures of the past quietly haunt our future-present.

Alison Nguyen is a visual artist working across video, installation, performance, and sculpture. Using approaches of speculative fiction, documentary research, and embodied performance, Nguyen creates works that reconsider how narratives operate within the individual, the institution, the archive, and within the politics of cultural memory.