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.