Shimon Attie

Shimon Attie (born 1957) is a contemporary visual artist based in New York City. He is known for nuanced, often deeply researched projects situated between installation art, video and photography. His work encompasses time-based, site-specific public art, immersive mixed-media installations for exhibition spaces, photographic series that include the documentation of public interventions, monographs and new media. 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." 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. Attie has been recognized with Guggenheim and Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowships, a Rome Prize and the Lee Krasner Award (Pollock-Krasner Foundation).

Early life and career Attie was born (1957) and raised in Los Angeles.

Photographic and public art projects, (1991–2005) Attie attracted wide attention for projects in the 1990s that represented the experience of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazi regime, the most prominent being a haunting photographic series and monograph, The Writing on the Wall (1992–93). After combing historical archives, he projected black-and-white, pre-Holocaust photographs he found of Jewish street life onto identical or nearby building fronts in East Berlin's run-down former Jewish Quarter at life-size scale, then photographed the results in color at night.

Shimon Attie, I remember when we lived in a tenement on the top floor in very bad condition. It was like a dream..., Lasers writing out a senior's memory, "Between Dreams and History" series, on-location laser installation and lambda photograph, 24" x 65", 1998. In several projects, Attie turned to the experiences of still-living immigrant populations. It included Portraits of Exile (1995)—an installation of nine large light boxes submerged underwater in a canal in front of the Danish parliament. The embedded close-up portraits of the series connected the dramatic 1943 Danish rescue of Jews on fishing boats to the country's housing of present-day asylum seekers in crowded container ships in Copenhagen harbor. 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.

The floating media installation Night Watch (2018–21) explored loss, displacement, inclusion and the building of community. deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, de Young Museum, Fond Nationale d'Art Contemporain (FNAC), High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Jewish Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Saint Louis Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern 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), 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.

Monographs 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