The Writing on the Wall
December 1 – 31, 1994
For The Writing on the Wall, I slide projected portions of pre-war photographs of Jewish street in Berlin onto the same or nearby addresses today. By using slide projection on location, fragments of the past were thus introduced into the visual field of the present. Thus parts of long destroyed Jewish community life were visually simulated, momentarily recreated.
The projections were visible to street traffic, neighborhood residents, and passersby.
I created art photographs of the black and white projections from the past interacting with the colored architecture of the present, onto which they were projected.
The Writing on the Wall project was realized in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel, located in the Eastern part of the city, close to the Alexanderplatz.
At the heart of Berlin, the Scheunenviertel was a center for eastern European Jewish immigrants from the turn of the century. The few historical photographs which remained after the Holocaust reflect the world of the Jewish working class rather than that of the more affluent and assimilated German Jews who lived mostly in the Western part of the city.
The Scheunenviertel today is a neighborhood in Berlin Mitte that has undergone rapid gentrification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Scheunenviertel became the new chic quarter and frontier for many West Berliners and foreigners. As a result, the neighborhood has seen a huge influx of new residents and capital from the West.
Within the course of only a few years, block after block of houses and buildings in the Scheunenviertel have become completely transformed. Most have been entirely renovated, from the inside out. Others have been transformed into fashionable and trendy bars and restaurants. As a result, the Scheunenviertel of today has become almost unrecognizable since the years when The Writing on the Wall project was realized in 1992-1993.
The “re-making” of the Scheunenviertel affects both Jewish as well as post-war East German collective memory and identity, as the last physical evidence of these histories has now almost entirely disappeared.
Shimon Attie is a visual artist whose work explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. His practice includes creating fine art photographs, site-specific immersive mixed-media installations for museums, galleries and public places. In many projects, Attie uses a variety of media to animate sites w/images of their lost histories or speculative futures. This has included introducing the histories and narratives of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. In other installations, he engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their histories, memories, and potential futures.
Attie’s work has been exhibited and collected by museums around-the-world, including NY MoMA, The National Gallery in Washington DC, Boston’s ICA, the Miami Art Museum, and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, among others. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim, the Rome Prize, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, a visual artist fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and an NEA grant among many others. In 2013 and 2019, he was awarded the Lee Krasner Achievement Award, and in 2018 was inducted into the National Academy of Design. Attie’s work has been the subject of six monographs, as well as films aired on PBS, BBC, and Germany’s ARD/ZDF.