Client: Private

Location: Berlin, Germany

Completion date: 1991

Artwork budget: $25,000

Project Team

Artist

Shimon Attie

Other

Industry Resource

Galerie im Scheunenviertel

Industry Resource

Stiftung Kunstfonds

Industry Resource

National Endowment for the Arts

Overview

For The Writing on the Wall project, I slide projected portions of pre-world war II photographs of Jewish street life in Berlin onto the same or nearby addresses where the photos were originally taken 60 years earlier.

Goals

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.

Process

As much of my art practice is a marriage between photography and installation art, during the course of the installations, I photographed the projections. The Writing on the Wall project was realized in one of Berlin’s former Jewish quarters, the Scheunenviertel, located in the Eastern part of the city, close to the Alexanderplatz.