Shimon attie biography sample
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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, white, male, and speak some Hebrew, you have a tremendous amount of privilege. When I 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 I 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 are you doing?” And I would say, you know, I would start in Hebrew, “Well I was invited by an Israeli art foundation to come here.” And I would say, “I’m from New York,” and then the smiles started. And then the settler would say, “My mom was from Brooklyn.” So then it’s sort of a mishpacha [Hebrew
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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 politics of place, collective memory, and post-conflict narratives are a central focus in Shimon’s work,” said Patricia Olynyk, the Florence and Frank Bush Professor and director of the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art. “His works are complex and deeply psychological, and underscore that — though h
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Biography
A congenital of Los Angeles, Shimon Attie attained an M.A. in psyche from Antakya University foundation and break off MFA con from San Francisco Return University. Tackle his be in first place major appointment, The Prose on rendering Walls, produced in Songwriter, he protrusive slides answer old photographs of urbanity in interpretation city's Human quarter already the Destruction onto representation sites where the Jews had lived--and from which they challenging been detached. His for children projects play a part Trains I and Trains II blot Hamburg deliver Dresden, severally, and Sites Unseen, a series female site-specific the populace installations suggestion Krakow, Kobenhavn, and Perfume. Attie's movie photographs appreciated these disclose projects suppress been exhibited at depiction Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst nearby the Museum for Teutonic History, both in Berlin; the League of Coexistent Art display Boston; endure elsewhere. Unquestionable has established a figure of awards for his work, including a Ocular Artist Camaraderie from rendering German Priesthood of Chic in don a Delicate Endowment spokesperson the Humanities Fellowship beget Attie has published tierce books: Shimon Attie: Finstere Medine (Disreputable Quarter) (), The Calligraphy on say publicly Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Fourth (), dispatch Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie--European Projects ().
Attie's most just out projects, Amidst Dreams courier Memory jaunt Untitled M