Shimon Attie: The View from Below

July 20 - October 14, 2023

Summer Hours: Open every evening of the Stony Brook Film Festival, July 20-29; Open by appointment August 1-25
Hours August 26-October 14: Monday-Friday, 12-4pm and evenings of Staller Center performances

Artist Talk and Reception: September, date and time to be announced

Featuring six of Shimon Attie’s major pieces from the last twenty-five years, The View from Below presents Attie’s ongoing exploration of migration, displacement and, more broadly, the search for home. Created in places where cultures, ethnicities, and identities converge, Attie’s site-specific monumental media installations merge geography, history and memory. Attie’s work focuses on the people whose individual narratives shape the cultural history of a place. The exhibition presents work from projects including The View from Below (2021), Night Watch (2018), The Crossing (2017), The History of Another (2003), Between Dreams and History (1998) and Portraits of Exile (1995).

Shimon Attie is an internationally renowned visual artist whose artistic practice includes creating site-specific installations in public places, accompanying fine art photographs, and immersive single- and multiple-channel video and mixed-media installations. Much of Attie’s work explores how a variety of contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. In many of his projects, Attie uses a variety of media to animate sites with 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 works, often using video, Attie directly engages local communities which have been persecuted, displaced and/or traumatized, to find new ways of representing their history and memory, present and potential futures.

Shimon Attie’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among many others. Six monographs and several films have been produced on his work. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Guggenheim, The Rome Prize, Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lee Krasner Award. Attie was the inaugural Charles C. Bergman Endowed Visiting Professor in Studio Art at Stony Brook University (2020-2022), made possible by an endowment from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and is currently Teaching Artist in Residence in The California Studio at the University of California, Davis.