11/12-Visiting Artist #4-Shimon Attie

Almstadtstrasse 43, Berlin (1930). (car parked in front of Hebrew bookstore)

Shimon Attie uses a variety of processes to reclaim the world’s buried histories. His works have included laser texts, projections onto buildings, glowing light-box portraits submerged in canals, and multi-layered photographs that conflate past and present. His body of work reveals the rich complexity of the past, and the dark secrets of our surrounding environment. Attie’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art-Berlinische Gallery, Berlin.

Mulackstrasse 37, Berlin (1932). (children and tower)

The first two images are among what Shimon first showed our group. Out of all the presenters this year I enjoy Attie's the best. He was really laid back, well spoken, and had a good sense of humor. His work is amazing. The imagery is so rich and colorful and once you add concept it blows your mind. He showed us color slides while the slide projector would behave. I enjoyed that his images use no photoshop or digital effects. He researched to find archival images of what these delapitated places used to look like. None of his work implements digital enhancing and I respect that. I enjoy seeing what he chooses to do to get his imagery to work. He is very clever and patient.

The piece Mulackstrasse 37,a slide projection of former Jewish residents. In this case, they happen to be two young children. What you see in the distance, to the left, that's the Berlin Alexanderplatz, and that large tower which comes up from the platz, was the former television tower of east German state television, before German reunification, so it's a very potent symbol.

The graffiti is a very important layer in the fabrics of these photographs. The entire sentence means "What the war spared did not survive socialism." So it was anti-socialist, anti–East German graffiti that was painted on the wall of this building after the Berlin Wall fell. So you have pre–war Jewish history, you have the history of the war, you have post-war socialist history, and you have post-German reunification history, all combined in one.

In a sense, I'm working as an artist-archeologist. I'm working to give visual form to personal and collective memories, in public spaces—memories that are latent in the architecture but that aren't visible. I think most people's response was the response of most of us to something that's beautiful. There was a sense of awe and fascination, wonderment, curiosity and intrigue. And then, only after, when they start to maybe read the Yiddish lettering or look at how the people are dressed and realizing that, in fact, these are Jewish phantoms from the neighborhood's pre-war past, then there's maybe a goose bump kind of response and maybe more a feeling of either sadness or discomfort.

What really inspired my Berlin project is I was walking along the streets of this neighborhood and I had such a strong feeling in my gut, "where are all the missing people?" I felt them but I couldn't see them. MOMA

What struck me strongest about Attie was his concern for the people. He wanted their humanity to show through and cared about where they had been and what had happened. His stories about the interaction with these people was amazing. I feel this was successfully done in his piece, Between Dreams and History. He interviewed various people around the lower east side of NYC and had them write down their favorite childhood rhymes/stories/poems etc in their first language. He narrowed down these and chose a handful to laser project on the facades of buildings at night, in English, Spanish, Chinese, Yiddish, or Hebrew. Watching the response of the viewers in a snippet of a documentary he showed us, there was a positive response. He wanted everyones stories to be there.



Most of the work he does like this is site specific and difficult to document. Seeing it on the dvd was very touching, Im sure live it would be even more. I really enjoyed how the writing appeared as if it was being written at that moment.