Artist Lecture: Shimon Attie

I absolutely loved Shimon Attie's lecture this afternoon. He was a funny and entertaining speaker, and his work was very interesting and inspiring.

Attie's work seems to commonly deal with themes of past and present, memory and reality, and frequently focuses on the history of various cultures. In his early 1990s project, The Writing on the Wall, Attie projected images of pre-WWII Jewish street life onto the facades of buildings in present day Berlin, Germany. He said he wanted it to be "as if time were burning through the facade of today."

More recently, Attie's work "hovers between photography and the moving image." I was particularly moved by his video installation, The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan, an Anatomy of a Welsh Village, in which he sought to help the village of Aberfan move on from its tragic past. I was disappointed that there is no way to access the video online, but I am posting stills and a brief look at the making of the project below. Attie documented the "standard" components of a Welsh village (mayor, singer, bartender, police officer, et cetera) in a way that granted them the anonymity they needed in order to lose their connection to a tragedy they so desperately wanted to forget. Village people were depicted as being able to live in any town free of disaster, yet they were frozen in time, just as Aberfan seemed to be since the avalanche that killed nearly all the town's children in one day (you can read about Aberfan here.) The video plays out very serenely, with the various characters standing in static poses, rotating on a moving set for a minute or so. It is set to very somber music, and I found it to be very powerful. As the figures rotate, perfectly still and expressionless, they almost look fake. However, if you watch closely you will be gently reminded of their humanity by an occasional blink or muscle twitch.

I really wish that I could post the video from The Attraction of Onlookers here, but as I mentioned before I can't find it online. Please see some of my favorite stills and photographs below.

From The Attraction of Onlookers:

From The Writing on the Wall:

Video clip from the making of The Attraction of Onlookers: