Current History
Video projection on fabric; Continuous loop

Created as a site-specific installation at Fairmount Water Works, Current History imagines the Schuylkill River that flows just outside of the Water Works’ historic walls as a timeline that connects the past, present and future. In the work, images projected onto translucent fabric flow across the screen, suggesting cultural and ecological transformations across two 250-year epochs. 

Exhibited in concurrence with the nation’s 2026 Semiquincentennial, Current History time-travels between the nation’s founding in 1776, our present moment, and the future Quincentennial in 2276, even as its lens remains fixed on the same body of water that snakes through the City. This temporal play appears as a kind of sample study, picturing singular objects that appear to float by viewers as if carried by the river’s current. As the piece progresses, the passage of time becomes clearer with each artifact washed downstream by the indifferent flow of the Schuylkill’s waters. 

Amidst the river current, sure signs of human activity flow by viewers. Surprisingly common historic river detritus such as firearms and antique chamber pots make high and low references to the first two-and-a-half American centuries in and around the river. The decapitated head of a statue commemorating a Viking explorer and other 20th. C. debris points to more contemporary sociopolitical tensions and environmental degradation. As the piece progresses, the work pictures a distant speculative future suggested by conversations with scientists working on the river today: robotic devices troll the riverbed free and clear of the previous signs of human life. This future scene alternately suggests a techno-utopian or a post-human world––each scenario containing a possible future manifestation of the social, environmental and political policies enacted today.

About the ArtistS 

The Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib have been collaborators since 2008. They are recipients of several honored awards including a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pew Fellowships in the Arts and Fellowships from CFEVA and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Their work has been widely exhibited both domestically and abroad at venues including, Fondazione MAXXI (Rome), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), UCLA Hammer Museum, PS1/MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Arizona State University Art Museum. They have been artists-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff Centre, Marble House Project, Interlude and the Millay Colony for Arts. Matthew Suib is co-founder of Greenhouse Media and Nadia Hironaka serves as a professor of film and video and studio arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hironaka & Suib are represented by Locks Gallery. The couple, along with their daughter and two cats reside in South Philly.