Sonia Rosa Kahn: Hereditaments
September 11 - September 26, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, September 11th, 6-9pm
On view: September 11 - September 26
Gallery Hours: Thursday - Sunday, 1-6pm
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.
Hereditaments 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.
This exhibition is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
ADDITIONAL PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Steam Works Kids Workshop - September 19th, 2-4pm
Closing Night & Live Music Performance w/ Maya Perry, Char Jeré, Aleksis Luriņš and Viktor Timofeev - September 26th, 7-10pm
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sonia Rosa Kahn (b. London, UK) is a U.S.-based artist whose interdisciplinary
practice combines moving image, printmaking and installation. Her work
examines the reproduction of photographic images and their social and
material lifespans. Kahn’s work has been shown both in the U.S. and
internationally, includingrecent exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum,
Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Parent Company Gallery, The Baltic
Analog Lab and Hua InternationalBerlin. She was the 2026 YCBA resident
at the Henry Moore Foundation (U.K.),received the Alice Kimball English
Traveling Fellowship (2026), Mortimer-HaysBrandeis Traveling Fellowship (2024)
and is a NYSCA Support for ArtistGrantee (2026). Kahn received her BA from
Columbia University in Art Historyand Visual Art and is currently an MFA
candidate at Yale University in Painting/Printmaking.
