Shimon Attie

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 (1991-1993) 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. He then photographed the resulting scene. A woman from the past looks out the window of a building now scrawled with graffiti. A pigeon shop with cages stacked on the sidewalk is restored to an otherwise empty street. The life and industry suggested in the projections of the past strike an unexpected counterpoint to the crumbling facades and apparently abandoned places of the present. (from: Museum of Contemporary Photography web page at: <a class=”aligncenter”

href=”http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php”>http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php

References: 

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2004/05/shimon_attie_th.php

Attie, Shimon. Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs. Burlington, VT: Verve, 1998.

Attie, Shimon, and Christopher Beaver. Between Dreams and History: The Making of Shimon Attie’s Public Art Projects(videorecording). Ben Lomond, CA: distributed by The Video Project, 2000 .

Attie, Shimon, Natasha Egan, and Alexander Stille. The History of Another. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2004.

Attie, Shimon, et al. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994.