Sonia Rosa Kahn

Sonia Rosa Kahn is an artist in New Haven. She works with 16mm film, printmaking, and installation to explore how photographs and their narratives decay over time, using erosion and chemical processes to transform found materials like microfilm and printed documents.

Sonia Rosa Kahn works at the intersection of 16mm film, printmaking, and installation, pursuing a single question: what happens to photographs and the narratives they carry when you let them decay? Born in London and now based in New York as an MFA candidate at Yale, she uses erosion, oxidation, and chemical development to test how images break down over time. She scavenges printed detritus, forgotten microfilm, and architectural traces—tax documents, newspaper clippings, legal charters—then loops them back through film stock. The prints become films. The films become prints. What emerges is less about preservation and more about how forgetting shapes what we know. Her practice asks whether a picture can survive its own disintegration.