Stateless Views of Global Migration

press release: Public Lecture: Thursday, September 26, 2019, 5:00 PM @ Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L150

Shimon Attie is an international visual artist whose work spans many media, but he is especially well-known for his site-specific public projections and video installations that focus on migrants, asylum seekers, and the persecuted. For TheWriting on the Wall (1991- 1992) Attie projected images of Jews and Jewish life from 1930s Berlin onto the buildings and in the neighborhoods where the images were originallytaken. This past fall, Night Watch, a series of video portraitsof asylum seekers, many of them queer, was installed on a floating barge equipped with a large-scale LED screen. The floating media Installation was floating and on view along Manhattan and Brooklyn’scoast during the UN General Assembly week. In more recent years, Attie has also created a number of multiple-channel immersive videoinstallations for museum and gallery exhibition.These have included a commission by the BBC and the Arts Council of Wales to create a 5-channel video installation on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary since the Aberfan disaster, when the village became ‘famous’ after having lost nearly all of its children in a manmade avalanche that buried Aberfan’s only elementary school. Attie also created Racing Clocks Run Slow: Archaeology of a Racetrack, a piece inspired by the former Bridgehampton Auto Racetrack in Bridgehampton, Long Island. Time permitting, Mr. Attie might present a sneak preview of his current project, Time Twirl (w/t), a video Installation which conflates our current political moment of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jacir Bolsenaro and their historical antecedents, with Brazilian dance, Mel Brooks and comedic representation of fascism. Mr. Attie has received 12year-long visual artist fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Academy in Rome (The Rome Prize), The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and Kunstfonds (Germany’s NEA equivalent).  

Nota bene: "The Crossing," an exhibition with works by Shimon Attie, is currently installed at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

It will be on view until September 29, 2019  

This event is possible thanks to the generous financial support of the UW Anonymous Fund and the Center for Jewish Studies. The Center for Visual Cultures would also like to thank the Departments of Art and Art History, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium for their support.