Shimon Attie is an American visual artist. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Rome Prize in 2001 and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study in 2007. His work spans a variety of media, including photography, site-specific installation, multiple channel immersive video installation, performance, and new media. Much of Attie's practice explores how a wide range of contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. Much of Attie's works in the 90s dealt with the history of World War II. He first garnered significant international attention by slide projecting images of past Jewish life onto contemporary locations in Berlin. More recent projects have involved using a range of media to engage local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory and potential futures. Attie's artworks and interventions are site-specific and immersive in nature, and tend to engage subject matter that is both social, political and psychological. In 2013, five monographs have been published on Attie's work, which has also been the subject of a number of films aired on PBS, BBC, and ARD. Since receiving his MFA in 1991, Attie has realized approximately 25 major projects in ten countries around the world. Most recently, in 2013-14, Shimon Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in Art.
Life
Shimon Attie was born in 1957 and received an MFA in 1991. In 1991, he moved to Germany from his previous home in Northern California, and began to make work initially about Jewish identity and the history of the second World War. His work later evolved to engage broader issues of memory, place and identity more generally. Attie moved to New York City in 1997.
Critical reaction
Shimon Attie's work has been extensively reviewed by a wide variety of publications, including features and/or reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and many others. Samples include: Yasaman Alipour, writing in "The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture", on Attie's solo exhibition "Facts on the Ground" at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City: "Celebrated for his approach, which blurs the line between installation and photography, Attie has spent his career moving from one city to the next to explore the trauma and history of the marginalized and to reflect on social memory and the construction of Identity. Seductive, daring, and clever, Facts on the Ground dives into the inherently charged and polarized politics of its subject matter. Attie achieves something profound: he presents a unique opportunity to contemplate Israel/Palestine without the distraction that is simultaneously a manifestation of the limitations of visual of written language and the possibilities of their alliance." June 3, 2016 Holland Cotter, writing in The New York Times on one of Attie's works in the traveling exhibition "Art, AIDS, America": "…Less familiar work makes the strongest impression, benefiting from the element of surprise. A beautiful 1998 photograph by Shimon Attie of a life-size projection of a male's image on a bed, is one." July 28, 2016 Norman Kleeblatt, writing in a cover story for Art in America on Attie's survey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston: "Like many other artists in the wake of Marcel Broodthaers, Attie is first and foremost an artist-anthropologist, a practitioner who digs into archives and then reconfigures his nonartistic source material into complicated art works." June 2000 Amei Wallach, writing a feature in a Sunday New York Times on Shimon Attie's public art installation, "Between Dreams and History", in Manhattan's Lower East Side: "…like the best of evanescent public projects, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag to Mr. Attie's "Writing on the Wall," this one will animate real anxieties in real time. Not to mention a sense of wonder." Sept 13, 1998 Laura Hodes in Forward felt his 2012 show at Northwestern succeeded in creating a space that was at once dream like and a memorial to the dead, involving the viewer in the historical situation: "we become simultaneously the hidden Jew, the marching Nazi, the Dutch passersby, the voyeur and even the medium itself."
