Shimon Attie, Berlin

Shimon Attie, by Timothy Greenfield Sanders

Between Dreams and History tells the story of the artist Shimon Attie as he creates his first work of public art in America. Prior to that installation, Attie, who studied art at San Francisco State College, created works of art in Europe dedicated to the idea of how to make memory visible in the present.

Attie’s breakthrough was his installation in Berlin, The Writing on the Wall. Attie researched photographs of Jews and Jewish businesses that existed in Berlin before their destruction by the rise of Nazi Germany. Attie then projected these images onto the actual buildings where the photographs were taken. Attie then photographed the resulting overlay of images.

The installation consists of the performance aspect of the actual projections, which required several hours to complete at night in extremely cold temperatures and the finished photographs that exist as prints and in Attie’s book, Sites Unseen.

I am someone who honors historic photographs and believes in their power to animate the world of the past in films. At times, as in the opening of the Nagasaki Journey film, I have dissolved from an old photograph perfectly matched to the same locale and vantage point of today. Yet Attie’s placement of historic images onto actual buildings completely overwhelmed me as an entirely new and innovative means of showing history and the present co-existing. I was blown away but what felt like an entirely new idea.

They say that a film should unfold in a manner that is elegant, unexpected and inevitable. From the time of Attie’s first installation in Berlin, he has continued to produce works of art that do not repeat the methods and achievements that have gone before. Attie’s work continues to unfold as elegant, unexpected, inevitable, and deeply touches the human heart.