Here, not Here, Shimon Attie’s (CRF 2010) first comprehensive survey exhibition on the West Coast, is on view through October 30 at Catharine Clark Gallery. Encompassing projects from 1993 to the present, Attie’s presentation raises critical questions about place/displacement, collective memory, and histories of trauma and resilience. Learn more about the show here.
Among the key projects featured in the exhibition is one of Attie’s most acclaimed series, The Writing on the Wall (1992 – 1993):
“In the series The Writing on the Wall, Attie projected found pre-war images of Jewish street-life in Berlin onto the same or nearby addresses in 1992/1993. Through this intervention, fragments of the past were introduced into the visual field of the present; long destroyed Jewish community life were visually simulated, momentarily recreated…
Attie notes that ‘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, a process of gentrification that further erases the remnants of the quarter’s pre-war history.'”
Image: Shimon Attie, Mulackstrasse 37: Slide projection of former Jewish residents, ca. 1932, Berlin, 1992. Ektacolor photograph; sheet: 24 x 20 inches.