Shimon attie biography of william hill

Shimon Attie: Horger Artist-In-Residence

Invited to create a new body of work as Lehigh University’s Horger Artist-in-Residence (2021-22) in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Design, Attie has created an artwork which interrogates Bethlehem's past and present as a microcosm of America.

From the city’s founding as “The Bethlehem of North America” by Moravian Christian fundamentalist and utopian settlers in 1741, to its later industrial heyday form the late 19th to 20th centuries as the capital of the American steel industry, only to then be followed by that very industry’s collapse; and finally from the post industrial economic devastation which ensued to the city’s partial economic reincarnation in the form of the Sands, and then later Wind Creek, Casino built on the very grounds of the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Bethlehem is a microcosm of America.

Attie’s project investigates this distinctly American brew of religious utopian fervor, industrial capitalism’s rise and fall, and finally its reinvention in catering to the hopes and dreams of making it big on the part of casino goers.

The completed artwork is a hybrid video and sculptural installation which complicates and conflates Bethlehem’s serpentine layers. The piece is comprised of a central sculptural element centered in between two channels of synchronized video.

The scaled facsimile is inspired by the existing 90-foot-tall brightly lit Bethlehem Star on the hill, built by the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce in 1937 as a commercially minded endeavor to brand Bethlehem as The Christmas City. The Star on the hill is brightly lit in “Christmas white” and on a clear evening is visible for 60 miles.

About Shimon Attie

Shimon Attie is an internationally renowned visual artist whose practice includes creating site-specific installations in public places, immersive multiple-channel video and mixed-media installations.  For two decades, Attie has made art that allows us to reflect o

October 30-December 16, 2012

MetroPAL.IS., the creation of the contemporary artist Shimon Attie, is presented in an oval configuration of eight video screens with the viewer standing within the oval. The artist’s intention is for the artwork to re-imagine and re-configure the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis by engaging their shared secondary hybrid identitythat of being New Yorkers. In many ways, the artwork is as much about what it means to be a New Yorker, to live in the United States, and to have a layered identity as an Israeli or Palestinian as it is about conflict in the Middle East. The artist invited twenty-four members of both communities, of various genders and occupations, into his studio to be filmed individually. They reflect in pairs not only their Palestinian and Israeli identities, but comparable occupations and conditions. Each participant read a scripted part from a hybrid document that Attie created, that merges the Israeli Declaration of Independence from 1948 with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence from 1988. When a few obvious key signifiers are removed, it is remarkable how much the two documents overlap and mirror each other. MetroPAL.IS. has been crafted and edited such that, like a Greek chorus, there are times when only one individual is speaking, or two, or eight, or none. Attie conceived of the piece in musical terms, with the relationship of individual voices being thought of as a score. The overall outcome results in the viewers finding themselves in a quasi endless hall of mirrors, of uncannily similar claims, assertions, and visages, alternating between a boisterous chorus and a single plaintive voice.

The success of MetroPAL.IS. is predicated in the belief that political discourse is best carried out by the personal voice of individuals, not by governments or political entities. Reconciliation is at the heart of MetroPAL.IS., yet ultimately the artist

Between People

This Place, Shimon Attie, and John Akomfrah

Is it Palestine or Judea and Samaria? Is it a homeland or a war zone? Can one even speak of it aloud?

It looks little at first like the site of conflict and communities. It has no obvious heroes or villains among its empty theaters and unsmiling faces. It has little time for what one might call everyday life. For the Brooklyn Museum, it is simply "This Place," but it looks nothing like Eastern Parkway. It looks nothing, too, like the darkened theater of Shimon Attie, broken by pretend movie marquees and imposing settlements. Yet it is also a place of barriers—physical and legal, sectarian and emotional. John Akomfrah has filmed them as well, in the tide of races and peoples fleeing Africa for Europe.

Two years after recent videos in Chelsea, he returns at the New Museum with "Signs of Empire." It shows his gift for spanning people and places while lingering over particulars. He can move between lovers in a "transfigured night" and post-colonial African leaders at the Lincoln Memorial—or between a founder of New Left Review, protests against empire, and the smoke and intimacy of a jazz combo, as The Unfinished Conversation. He can move, too, between Moby Dick and endangered polar bears to grasp the costs of a sea crossing from Nigeria. His stories seem at once strange and familiar, as memories do. First, though, the stated place of political art.

Dis place

The contributors to "This Place" want not just to name it, but to commemorate it and its people. As curators, Charlotte Cotton and Cora Michael see shared themes of "family, identity, home, and landscape and the environment." For a war zone, it sounds downright livable. For Frédéric Brenner, in fact, it could be the site of a rebirth—for two peoples and the arts. In inviting himself and others to spend months there at a time, he had in mind a Farm Security Administration for the

THESIS BETWEENMEMORYANDHISTORY: SHIMONATTIE’SARTOFREMEMBRANCE

MA THESIS by Melissa J. Bushnick submitted at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

DATE 2010

SOURCE IDEALS © The Author

BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY: SHIMON ATTIE’S ART OF REMEMBRANCE

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois

Adviser:

Assistant Professor Terri Weissman

ABSTRACT

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, American-Jewish artist Shimon Attie traveled to the former Jewish quarter of Berlin and wondered “Where are all the missing people?” With this question in mind, Attie embarked on a two year project that involved converting black and white archival photographs of pre-war Jewish life in Berlin into slides and projecting them onto the sites they were originally taken. During the course of the one or two day installation, Attie would photograph the projection.

These photographs would become The Writing on the Wall series, in which Attie sought to reveal not what was but instead what was lost, using photography to evoke both absence and memory. As a work enacted in public space, Attie sought to reinhabit both the neighborhood and the minds of those who see his work with the memory of Berlin’s forgotten Jewish community, creating an active, experiential form of memory work. Through using the medium of photography in different ways, Attie thus creates a space in which history and memory converge: in their phantasmal form, the documentary historical photographs become transformed into a visual manifestation of memory.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………….………………………………...…………1

CHAPTER 2: POST-MEMORY…………………………………………….……...…………….5

CHAPTER 3: THE SCHEUNENVIERTEL………………………........................