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The Writing on the Wall was a temporary site-specific installation created by the American artist Shimon Attie in Berlin during 1991-92. Attie had moved to Berlin in 1991, shortly after completing his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and developed the project in response to the absence of visible traces of Berlin's prewar Jewish communities. Unsettled by what he experienced as a ghostly presence, Attie went in search of archival images of the Jewish community that had thrived in Berlin before the Holocaust. Combing through various private and public archives, Attie discovered photographs of daily Jewish life in the Scheunenviertel district, an area that became part of the former East Berlin. By the 1920s, this section was home to large numbers of Eastern European Jews ( Ostjuden) who had fled persecution in Poland and Russia. The Ostjuden were largely working class, and still unassimilated in contrast to their more prosperous and established German Jewish counterparts. Because of this, the Ostjuden were more "visible" to an American artist seeking archival traces of Jewish life.
With the archival images in hand, Attie went in search of the original sites depicted in the photographs and projected the black and white historical images, in life size, onto the same locations (with some exceptions). He then photographed the resulting scene. This public art installation was temporary and carried no warning or explanation: Passersby simply encountered it as they walked down the street and into the space of the projections. Attie's photographs of the installations are more than simple documentation; taken with a large-format camera using long exposures that remove viewers and passersby, they show empty street scenes whose color and contrast is enhanced with filters. These "art photographs," as Attie calls them, were exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe and were published in English and German editions along with photographs from related projects developed by Attie in several European cities between 1991 and 1994.
Although Attie has produced several major projects during the years since his relatively low-tech, low-budget installation in the Scheunenviertel, he remains most known for the images from "The Writing on the Wall," which have graced posters for academic conferences on Holocaust Studies...