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.
