"The History of Another: Projections in Rome" 2004
"The Conductor" The Attraction of Onlookers
Shimon Attie received a B.A. in 1980 from the University of California, Berkley, a M.A. from Antioch University, San Francisco in 1982, and a M.F.A in 1991 at the San Francisco State University. He has participated in several solo exhibitions including one at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, the National Museum of Wales, the Mediatheque Louis Aragon in Martigues, France, and an exhibit at the Miami Art Museum in Miami, Florida. Originally from California, Attie left the states and headed to Berlin to work on his first assignment focusing on Jewish villages in East Berlin during and after WWII. The title of this assignment is “The Writing on the Wall.” Attie explained it as a low-tech guerilla project that involved four old projectors, a small portable generator, old Kodak camera, and lots of research through old photographic archives about Jewish street life. “Concerned with questions of memory, place, and identity, Shimon Attie gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by introducing histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. The Writing on the Wall project took place in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. There Attie projected slides made from pre-Holocaust photographs of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and shops in the same (or sometimes nearby) locations where the original images were taken.” That is an excerpt from a page on the Museum of Contemporary Photography website about Shimon Attie and his recent work.
One project that I found to be most interesting to me, is titled “Portraits of Exile”, was created in 1995, and installed underwater in a canal in Copenhagen. He created light boxes that were 9feet by 9feet and were placed about 15 feet from the area where the audience is standing. These portraits portrayed both Danish Jews that were rescued by the Swedes in 1943 and now present-day refugees. The water that rushed over these light boxes changed by the minute according to the current and if there was any action in the waterway like boats or any other means of transportation that would pass through. He views the water as a medium for transit, safety, and memory. The light box installation stayed under water for about two months.
Between Dreams and History Article
Jack Shainman Gallery
Museum of Contemporary Photography Article
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