Alison Nguyen Film to Debut on the High Line This September, Co-Commissioned With CHANEL Culture Fund
Artist Alison Nguyen will premiere a new film in September 2026 on the High Line in New York, commissioned jointly by High Line Art and the CHANEL Culture Fund as part of the park's High Line Originals series.
The work, titled Prior Occupants, traces the layered histories embedded in the High Line's relationship to Westbeth Artist Housing — the artists' residence in Manhattan's West Village that occupies a former Bell Telephone Laboratories complex. According to a statement from Galerie du Monde, which represents Nguyen, the film digs into the obscured industrial, cultural and nuclear histories of the High Line's "severed existence" at the Westbeth site, where the elevated rail line was cut off from its original path and the building repurposed for artists' live-work studios in the late 1960s.
High Line Originals is the programme through which the elevated park on Manhattan's West Side commissions new moving-image and sound works, screening them in a dedicated space along the route. The CHANEL Culture Fund, the luxury house's global arts initiative launched in 2021, partners with institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others, to back commissions and research by artists the fund identifies as under-recognised.
For Nguyen, the commission lands in a busy season. She is also set to participate in the 2026 Busan Biennale in South Korea, which runs from 29 August to 1 November, as reported by HENN News on 22 July 2026. The biennale, one of Asia's recurring large-scale contemporary art exhibitions, places her work in an international context just weeks before the High Line premiere.
ARTnews first reported the commission on 13 August 2026, confirming the involvement of both the High Line and the CHANEL Culture Fund.
Nguyen's practice spans film, video and installation, often drawing on archival material and speculative narrative to reconstruct overlooked histories. The High Line commission gives that approach a specific address: a building that itself embodies the transformation of industrial infrastructure into cultural use, a shift the park's own creation mirrors. The railway that became the High Line was freight traffic into the 1980s; Westbeth, the labs that became studios.
The film's September debut will be free to view, like all High Line Art programming along the mile-and-a-half-long park, which draws millions of visitors a year. No specific screening dates within September have yet been announced.
