Read New York Times Feature on Night Watch here.
Shimon Attie Inducted into The National Academy of Design, 2018
National Academicians are professional artists and architects who are elected to membership by their peers annually. They represent some of the most distinguished practitioners in their respective fields. This lifetime honor is among the highest and most unique in the United States, connecting National Academicians to a lineage of more than 2,300 of the leading artistsand architects who have influenced American culture over the past 200 years.
Shimon Attie receives commission to create new site-specific artwork for New York City
Night Watch
Shimon Attie
September 20—28, 2018
More Art collaborates with multidisciplinary artist Shimon Attie and refugee empowerment organizations to present a floating multi-media film experience during the UN Annual General Assembly
Encounter the traveling film and media Installation at various waterfront
locations and parks in NYC & NJ every day from 6-10PM
Stay tuned for later details with the full list of public programs, viewing locations, dates and times, as well as information on the September 20 opening!
On Thursday, September 20, 2018, More Art will premiere Night Watch, a floating film installation portraying refugees and asylees who have fled violence and discrimination from their homelands. This work by Shimon Attie, which will traverse New York City’s waterways during the United Nations Annual General Assembly, features 12 individuals (largely LGBTQ and youth) who have been granted political asylum in the US. Night Watch is displayed on a 20-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall LED screen mounted aboard a large utility vessel. The silent, floating film was produced in close collaboration with Immigration Equality, Safe Passage Project and RIF, and in consultation with ORAM, New Women New Yorkers, and New York for Syrian Refugees. Night Watch confronts the urgent social issue of refugees in the U.S. The traveling project will be on view along the waterfront from September 20 to September 28, 2018. Each day, the public can track the boat to attend historical tours, cultural events, and workshops related to immigrant rights.
Download the press release.
More about the artist
Shimon Attie is a visual artist whose artistic practice includes creating immersive site-specific installations and public artworks in a wide variety of media, contexts, and communities. Attie’s works include on-location media installations, immersive multiple channel video works, performance, photography, sculpture, and new media and hybrid forms. In many of his projects, he engages local communities in finding new courses for representing their history, memory, and potential futures, and explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between time, space, place and identity.
Support Refugees and Asylum Seekers!
The current administration’s immigration-related executive orders have unique and potentially harmful implications for the LGBTQ+ community. In nearly 80 countries around the world, it is a crime to be LGBTQ+. LGBTQ+ refugees turned away at our borders face death at home or in refugee camps. The increased use of detention centers for would-be asylees is particularly problematic because of the documented history of sexual and physical abuse endured by LGBTQ+ detainees.
Through public art like Night Watch, More Art aims to expand the work of legal aid and outreach-focused organizations in order to increase visibility and advocacy around policy issues for immigrants.
Night Watch is supported in part by
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ABOUT MORE ART
More Art is a nonprofit that supports collaborations between artists and communities to create thought-provoking public art and educational programs that inspire social justice.
MORE ART TEAM
Micaela Martegani • Jeff Kasper
Samantha Giarratani • Kate Levy
Brandi Mathis • Emma Drew
Zoey Hart • Yiyun Jia
Contact More Art at:
[email protected]
232 East 11 Street, Floor 1
New York, NY 10003
Shimon Attie’s immersive Installation “Stateless” to be shown with Stan Douglas, Kahlil Joseph, Omer Fast, Jeremy Deller and others at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague
Shimon Attie’s Installation “Stateless” will be exhibited at the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague from January 18-March 18, 2018. The work will be on view as part of an 8-person exhibition of contemporary video art entitled “Domestic Arenas” (w/t). The other artists in the exhibition include Stan Douglas, Kahlil Joseph, Omer Fast, Jeremy Deller & Cecilia Bengolea, and John Akomfrah.
The exhibition will focus on contemporary artists whose work exists on the boundary between film and video art.
Stateless: Shimon Attie solo exhibition at Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, Germany, 2017
Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig is delighted to announce Stateless, the first German solo exhibition by NY-based artist Shimon Attie since he produced the celebrated project The Writing on the Wall in Berlin in the nineties. Stateless explores issues of flight, loss and belonging at a time when many immigrants are seeking refuge in Europe and are at risk of being banned from other parts of the Western world. Stateless also involves other communities, who lived, or are still living, in a situation of limbo, whether their predicament was caused by an ongoing conflict or the revocation of their citizenship and identity.
Stateless is named after an installation in the exhibition, which tackles the experience of Syrian refugees who have fled their war-torn country and undertaken a life-threatening journey to Europe. More broadly, this artwork addresses the reality that human existence is subjected to the uncontrollable forces of life and death. In addition to the video installation, the exhibition also includes photographs from Attie’s earlier projects. Facts on the Ground (2013-14) delves into the physical, political and psychological landscapes of Israel and Palestine, where the two-state solution is still to be brokered. The Writing on The Wall (1991-92) evokes the daily life of the less affluent part of Berlin’s Jewish community, those originating from Russia and Poland in the Scheunenviertel neighbourhood in East Berlin. The Nazis revoked their nationality in 1938, one of the alienating measures suffered by these communities, before they became persecuted, deported and eventually murdered in mass.
The video installation Stateless has been specially configured for the raw spaces of Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, a reconverted power station. It consists of a panoramic screen suspended in the former boiler room. The filmed sequences unfold as a series of slow-moving tableaux in which a group of young Syrian refugees act a metaphorical tale based on their individual experience of exile and flight. Engrossed in a game of roulette, the protagonists appear physically present but mentally absent: their deadpan expressions, slow movements and silence contrast with the brutality of their fate. No word is spoken and the ominous soundtrack oscillates between impressions of stormy seas and the pounding of an anxious heart, between the ricocheting of the roulette ball and the gripping of nails onto the tablemat. As in Agatha Christie’s novel, And then there were none…, all but one disappear. The last one standing seemed doomed to become a living monument to the thousands who have been left behind, dead or alive.
Curator: Stéphanie Delcroix
Stateless is produced by Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig
1 July – 13 August 2017
Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig
Saalfelder Straße 8 b
04 179 Leipzig
Germany
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10 am- 6 pm
Currents 113: Lost in Space (After Huck), Shimon Attie solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 2017
The Saint Louis Art Museum presents an exhibition of new work by Shimon Attie in Lost in Space (After Huck), the 113th installment of the museum’s popular Currents series.
For the exhibition, Attie is creating an immersive multi-media environment comprised of a large-scale sculpture surrounded by a six-channel video projection and audio soundtrack.
Lost in Space (After Huck) consists of a white cast epoxy resin sculpture of a raft populated by several objects indicating human presence: a knife, a corn-cob pipe, an oar, some sticks tied at the top, and a bindle bag. The raft and its rustic objects evoke a bygone era, in particular, that of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But another item sticks out in this surreal scene—a police light sitting atop the raft, softly glowing red and drawing viewers into an awareness of the contemporary moment.
An immersive video installation surrounds the raft. The footage—featuring clusters of lights periodically disrupted by a flash of lightning—was actually taken from NASA satellites at night, capturing patterns of light that are emitted from American urban areas. The satellite images were then animated to create the video.
From the exhibition’s curator, Hannah Klemm:
“Attie’s installation establishes a purposeful ambiguity, creating a symbolic space where meanings from the past can be examined alongside important socio-political issues of the present,” said Hannah Klemm, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art. “With this wondrous environment, Attie overlaps multiple imaginaries and realities: contemporary lived space with romanticized depictions of nature, urban spaces with rural ones, and the celestial sphere with the terrestrial, man-made world.”
The exhibition is on view from April 1 through June 25, 2017.