Alison Nguyen's Prior Occupants, a new film for High Line Originals co-commissioned with the CHANEL Culture Fund, is featured in ARTnews in an article by Daniel Cassady.
Excerpted from the full article published on ARTnews.
Rather than focusing on the High Line itself, Nguyen turns her attention to the nearby Westbeth Artist Housing, a former Bell Laboratories complex where talking movies, television, and other technological breakthroughs were developed and where part of the Manhattan Project's research for the atomic was once conducted. In 1970, it was converted into affordable artist housing, whose notable past tenants have included Robert De Niro Sr. and Diane Arbus. The film draws on archival materials, interviews with residents, and choreographed performances to explore how traces of that industrial past continue to shape the neighborhood today.
Image: Prior Occupants, 2026 (Film still). Restaging of photographer Rick Darke's 2002 photo of the High Line. Image courtesy Alison Nguyen.
Text Courtesy of Daniel Cassady and ARTnews.
Learn more --
