Shimon attie biography sample

Andrea: While you were working on this project, did your feelings or impressions of Israel change from before you started working on the project?

Shimon: I was reminded that if you’re American, Jewish, vit, male, and speak some Hebrew, you have a tremendous amount of privilege. When inom think about all the things that could have gone wrong—and maybe only one or two things went wrong and a hundred things went right—I was just reminded of that position of privilege that inom was afforded. For example, I remember doing some of these installations in settlements in the West Bank. Now, even though we had permission from the Secretariat—the administration of the settlement—it didn’t mean that Israeli settlers on the ground were going to be cooperative with you. The letter doesn’t mean anything to them. I remember doing installations in these settlements and someone would come outside, would walk out of their settler trailer or their caravan, and they would sort of accost me, like, “What

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The words shine brightly, with ambiguous authority, across embattled landscapes. “Wild” reads a custom light box, sited on the edge of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. “And urgent” reads another.

In “Facts on the Ground” (), multimedia artist Shimon Attie captures the uneasy visual, cultural and political separations that have come to define the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. For all their deceptive simplicity, Attie’s short, enigmatic phrases — installed in and around Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Negev desert and the occupied West Bank — resist easy interpretation, raising as many questions as they answer.

Over the past two decades, Attie earned an international reputation for exploring themes of place, memory and communal trauma, as well as the potential for regeneration. This fall, the Saint Louis Art Museum and Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts welcomes Attie to St. Louis as their Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow.

“The politi

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Biography

A native of Los Angeles, Shimon Attie earned an M.A. in psychology from Antioch University in and an MFA in from San Francisco State University. In his first major project, The Writing on the Walls, produced in Berlin, he projected slides of old photographs of life in the city's Jewish quarter before the Holocaust onto the sites where the Jews had lived--and from which they had been removed. His subsequent projects included Trains I and Trains II in Hamburg and Dresden, respectively, and Sites Unseen, a series of site-specific public installations in Krakow, Copenhagen, and Cologne. Attie's documentary photographs of these public projects have been exhibited at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst and the Museum for German History, both in Berlin; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; and elsewhere. He has received a number of awards for his work, including a Visual Artist Fellowship from the German Ministry of Culture in and a National Endowment for the A