Shimon Attie "Race Migration Memory" 2023.11.03 Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies

By Brett Kaplan, Director of Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies

Shimon Attie came to campus in 2009 and I was so bummed to miss it! That year, I had a fellowship at the USHMM and Michael Rothberg had already invited Shimon and James Young to campus. The talk was apparently brilliant—and is archived on our website.

I had first encountered Shimon’s work several years earlier, when I was in graduate school at Sussex, through his series “The Writing on the Wall” (1991-2). Images of Jewish people, shops, scenes, projected the past onto the present, bringing back images of Jewish life before the Shoah, disallowing forgetting or overwriting. The projections are ghostly, mournful, and deeply moving. 

Attie describes these works as “peeling back the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.” 

Shimon has created numerous projects since then—I encourage you to look at his website which is beautiful (not surprisingly) and which lists many of them.

One of the most incredible in imagination and execution was “Night Watch” in which enormous photographs of people who had been granted asylum in NYC were placed on barges which circumnavigated the isle of Manhattan. 

Attie’s work has garnered attention with major articles in venues such as the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and many others; he’s the recipient of a Guggenheim, and NEA, The Rome Prize, and many others. His work has been featured in films shown on PBS and elsewhere, and exhibited at MOMA, the Pompidou, The National Gallery of Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and so many more places!

It is an enormous pleasure to welcome Shimon back to campus!  And, with apologies, I forgot to hit the record button so this intro is not included in the zoom, but the rest of the conversation is there. Enjoy.