American, b. 1957
For two decades, Shimon Attie has made art that allows us to reflect on the relationship between place, memory and identity. His artistic practice includes creating site-specific installations in public places, accompanying art photographs, immersive multiple-channel video and mixed-media installations for museums and galleries, and new media works. In many of his projects, he engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures, and explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place and identity. He is particularly concerned with issues of loss, communal trauma and the potential for regeneration.
In earlier works, Attie has used contemporary media to re-animate architectural and public sites with images of their lost histories, and how histories of marginalized and forgotten communities may be visually introduced into the physical landscape of the present. These works ranged from on-location slide projections in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to underwater light boxes in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven Canal, to sophisticated laser projections illuminating the immigrant experience on tenement buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. Attie has described these works, in part, as “a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.”
In more recent years, Attie has also created a number of multiple-channel immersive HD video installations. These have included a commission by the BBC and the Arts Council of Wales to create a 5-channel video installation on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary since the Aberfan disaster, when the village became ‘famous’ after having lost nearly all of its children in a manmade avalanche that buried Aberfan’s only elementary school. In 2008, he completed a commission from San Francisco’s de Young Museum to create a new work of art. The result was a 3-channel video installation, Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum, which deals with the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object. And in 2011, Attie created MetroPAL.IS., an 8-channel video installation in-the-round for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum that involves members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities living in New York City.
Attie has received 11 year-long visual artist fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was born in Los Angeles, California, earned his MFA in 1991, and currently lives and works in New York City.
In earlier works, Attie has used contemporary media to re-animate architectural and public sites with images of their lost histories, and how histories of marginalized and forgotten communities may be visually introduced into the physical landscape of the present. These works ranged from on-location slide projections in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to underwater light boxes in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven Canal, to sophisticated laser projections illuminating the immigrant experience on tenement buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. Attie has described these works, in part, as “a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.”
In more recent years, Attie has also created a number of multiple-channel immersive HD video installations. These have included a commission by the BBC and the Arts Council of Wales to create a 5-channel video installation on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary since the Aberfan disaster, when the village became ‘famous’ after having lost nearly all of its children in a manmade avalanche that buried Aberfan’s only elementary school. In 2008, he completed a commission from San Francisco’s de Young Museum to create a new work of art. The result was a 3-channel video installation, Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum, which deals with the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object. And in 2011, Attie created MetroPAL.IS., an 8-channel video installation in-the-round for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum that involves members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities living in New York City.
Attie has received 11 year-long visual artist fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was born in Los Angeles, California, earned his MFA in 1991, and currently lives and works in New York City.
