Hereditaments is a meditation on obsolescence and a communion between the form and function of a decidedly bygone industrial site. Using photochemical film, Sonia Rosa Kahn charts the limits of a place’s knowability. Rejected tax documents, legal charters, and microfilm clippings from newspapers flash in a 16mm web of information, revealing mostly practical matters: a deed signed, a plot sold off and segmented, a building erected and long since replaced. A gym was built, then a fish tinnery. An industrial boiler remains. Why is this thing here? Who relied on it? What can be gained by pursuing a fugitive vernacular history? A paper trail that begins in the 17th century with an inlet, a swamp, and ends with a roiling engine.
The Boiler, the first and remaining building on this segment of North 14th street—on the boundary between Williamsburg and Greenpoint—is the protagonist of a muddied plot and one of the few remnants of the neighborhoods’ legacy of 20th century energy and manufacture. Kahn’s site survey is an exhibition of expanded cinema that pulls in 3D scans and infrared captures as contemporary reconstructions of the past that layer a present nonfunction over a dense record of bureaucracy. Aluminum plates eroded with the outtakes of 1940s tax photographs blow up fragments and strips of moving images, distilling them in oxidized decay. This collapse of media and time explores an unresolving tension between the past, present and future, and questions if it is possible to map what is irrevocably buried.
This exhibition is comprised of a 6-channel 16mm film sculpture, 35mm Ektagraphic slide film, large scale aluminum panels, prints, and carved stone; with sound design by Aleksis Luriņš.
