Alison Nguyen’s upcoming film will trace the hidden nuclear history embedded in the Highline and the Westbeth Artist Community (formerly Bell Labs), where critical cinema and military technologies, including components later used in the atomic bomb, were developed. Using the remaining architectural details of Bell Labs' former presence as departure points, Nguyen explores what material and cultural histories persist within sites of adaptive reuse, and what is obscured or erased. In an assemblage of audiovisual material including sculpturally re-filmed archival documents, performance sequences, and layered audio interviews with residents and architects who have shaped Wesbeth Artist Community and the surrounding Highline Park, the film explores individual and collective relationships to place, technological development, and mortality, foregrounding the ways that structures of the past quietly haunt contemporary urban landscapes.
The film will be exhibited on loop on the High Line from September 2026 - November 2026.
BIO
Alison Nguyen is visual artist and filmmaker working across video, installation, and sculpture. Her practice combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history. With approaches of speculative fiction, documentary research, and performance, Nguyen’s work proposes counter-mythologies.
Alison Nguyen’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art; MIT List Center for Visual Arts; Storefront for Art and Architecture; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; Vienna Secession; The Everson Museum; e-flux; International Studio & Curatorial Program; Murmurs; KAJE; Microscope Gallery; Ann Arbor Film Festival; International Film Festival Oberhausen; CPH:DOX; Edinburgh International Film Festival; True/False Film Festival; Open City Documentary Festival; and Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, among others.
Alison Nguyen received her M.F.A. in Visual Art from Columbia University and her B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. She was a 2023-2024 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Learn More: http://www.alisonnguyen.com