Shimon Attie

Attie's subject matter centers on marginalized histories and communities, examining instances of trauma, displacement and disenfranchisement while also highlighting themes of community, endurance, perseverance and humanity. Curator Hannah Klemm wrote, "Attie's practice explores ideas of space, place, social memory and identity. His multifaceted projects shine a light on what has been lost, buried or forgotten … expos[ing] the layers of history that construct our world." Attie's art belongs to public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, Jewish Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography. He has also exhibited at those venues, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others.

• Name — Shimon Attie • Born — 1957 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California, US • Known for — Photography, installation art, video, public art • Education — San Francisco State University • Awards — Guggenheim Fellowship Rome Prize Pollock-Krasner Foundation Harvard Radcliffe Institute • Website — Shimon Attie

Attie was born (1957) and raised in Los Angeles. He initially studied psychology and was a psychotherapist in San Francisco before turning to art and photography; some writers have related this background to his work's longstanding interest in uncovering hidden layers of meaning. After completing an MFA at San Francisco State University in 1991, Attie relocated to Berlin to become a full-time artist, inspired by a trip there the prior year shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At a time when European artists were exploring how new media might examine Germany's troubled history, he focused his work on its Jewish community before and during the Nazi era. Attie returned to San Francisco in 1996 before moving to New York City the following year. • Illustration — Shimon Attie, Almstadtstrasse 43, slide projection of former Hebrew bookstore, 1930, Berlin, "The Writing on the Wall" series, Chromogenic photograph and on-location installation, 33" x 39", 1992.

Attie's community-based projects often examine how history, individual and collective trauma, and memory are both interlinked and malleable. The Attraction of Onlookers: An Anatomy of a Welsh Village (2008, National Museum of Wales) offered a restrained yet intimate portrait of the community of Aberfan, 40 years after a human-caused mountainside disaster buried the town's only grammar school, taking the lives of a generation of children and many adults. Attie filmed individuals rotating slowly on a platform in a darkened void as they "performed" their real roles—some iconic Welsh tropes identifiable by their tools of trade or uniforms—recasting the village as also typical as it attempted to move beyond the catastrophe, public scrutiny and resulting loss of privacy. The Crossing (2017) used a gambling metaphor to dramatize the extraordinary risks taken by migrants in times of crisis. The film depicts seven Syrian refugees (recent arrivals in Europe) at a casino engaged in a game of roulette that unfolds in seven slow-moving tableaux without dialogue. The sequences were determined by the refugees' experiences of exile and flight and featured a person disappearing without explanation, until only one participant remained. The floating media installation Night Watch (2018–21) explored loss, displacement, inclusion and the building of community. Traveling waterways around New York City on a barge during the fall 2018 UN General Assembly Week, the project (which also appeared in the San Francisco Bay in 2021) blended human and metaphoric dimensions: waterways as sites of escape and rescue, the resemblance of a barge to a raft. Its looping 20-foot screen displayed silent video portraits—figures emerging from darkness, approaching, and in close-up, gazing intently—of twelve New Yorkers recently granted political asylum in the US after fleeing violence and discrimination from diverse homelands. • Illustration — Shimon Attie, Night Watch (Norris at Sunset), 20'-wide LED screen on barge, Hudson River, 30" x 45" lambda photograph, 2019. In other projects, Attie considered the ways space and place both define and are defined by communities. For Facts on the Ground (2014), he interrupted desert and urban landscapes across Israel and Palestine with custom-made light boxes that illuminated short, enigmatic or poetic phrases, employing compositions and locations carefully chosen for their historical, sociopolitical and physical specifics. Lost in Space (After Huck) (2017, Saint Louis Art Museum) was an immersive, site-specific installation that drew inspiration from that city's location on the Mississippi River and proximity to the city of Ferguson, a site of racial tensions in the US. The installation centered on an otherworldly cast-resin sculpture of a raft, which appeared to float in surrounding celestial space (actually animated NASA images of American cities at night seen from space). Referencing both the journey in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and recent events, the raft juxtaposed rustic, anachronistic objects with one contemporary item—a softly glowing bright red police light—a contrast echoed in the work's aural mix of natural and abstracted news-media sounds. Like Lost in Space, Attie's commissioned installation at Lehigh University Art Galleries in Bethlehem, PA, Starstruck: An American Tale (2022), introduced sculptural elements alongside multi-channel video. It examined Bethlehem as a microcosm of America and representation of how histories, personal narratives and social and economic systems are interconnected. The installation featured two walls of projected video representing layers of Bethlehem's complex past, which flanked a replica of the city's 91-foot star symbol equipped with synchronized music and lighting that oscillated between "Christmas white" and a rotating color display akin to a casino wheel of fortune. Its references included the city's founding by Moravian Christian reformist settlers in 1741, its late 19th- to 20th-century industrial heyday as a steel capital and subsequent Rust Belt collapse, which saw the steel plant shuttered and transformed into a casino. Moving between still shots and slow camerawork, the video's collapse of time and narrative embodied moments of overlap and rupture in the public sphere and built environment that offer opportunities for dialogue and change.

• The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter; Shimon Attie – Photographs and Installations, essays by Michael A. Bernstein, Erwin Leiser and Shimon Attie, Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Braus, 1993 • Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie – European Projects, essay by James Young and introduction by Jill Medvedow, Heidelberg, Germany/Vermont, US: Edition Braus/Verve Editions, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1998 • The History of Another: Projections in Rome, Shimon Attie, Santa Fe, NM/Chicago: Twin Palms Press/The Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2004 • The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan – An Anatomy of a Welsh Village, Shimon Attie with foreword by John Humphrys, essays by Chris Townsend and Melanie Doel, Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Books, 2008 • Facts on the Ground, Shimon Attie with introduction by Mieke Bal, essay by Gannit Ankori/Samir Srouji, California, US: Nazraeli Press, 2016 • Starstruck: An American Tale, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2023

Attie's work belongs to the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Berlinische Galerie, Brandts Museum of Photographic Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Cleveland Museum of Art, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, de Young Museum, Fond Nationale d'Art Contemporain (FNAC), High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Jewish Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Gallery of Art, Perez Art Museum Miami, Saint Louis Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among others Attie has been awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2001), Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship (2006), John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement (2013, 2019). In 2018 he was inducted as member of National Academy of Design. He has received grants from Kunstfonds in Germany and the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) in the US. Attie has been an artist-in-residence at the Bau Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, Macdowell, Wexner Center for the Arts and Yaddo, among others. His work has also been the subject of documentary films made by others that have aired on PBS, BBC and Germany's ARD.