Shimon Attie at the ICA

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes that the body of the filmed subject "loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. The projector will play with his shadow before the public." Shimon Attie's work, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is premised on such shadowplay, but with profoundly moving results.

The exhibition, titled "Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie, Photographs and Public Projects, 1992-1998," is the first retrospective of the artist's work and encompasses several of his European installations, as well as his most recent offerings in San Francisco and New York.

Attie's first public work, The Writing on the Wall, projected pre-war photographs of the Jewish community onto the facades of houses in Berlin's eastern Scheunenviertel. The effect of seeing Jewish lives lost to the Holocaust superimposed upon the crumbling buildings that had once been their homes was deeply disorienting; the images were projected for several evenings and served as a testimony in light to passers-by. The ICA has lightbox photographs of the projections on display as documents of the 1992 event.

The installation continues with Portraits of Exile, a 1995 public project in Copenhagen. There, Attie submerged images under the city's main canal to commemorate the role Denmark played in rescuing the lives of its Jewish inhabitants. Many Jews were ferried to safety through fishing routes, so that water and light become working metaphors of representation and remembrance. The piece also thematizes the more recent and problematic immigration of refugees from the Balkans and former Soviet Union seeking asylum in Denmark. More personal is the series Untitled Memory (Projections), in which photographs of the artist's family and friends are cast upon the surfaces of his San Francisco apartment, creating an intimate and deceptively real experience.

To provide a live example of the earlier projects documented by the show, Attie was commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the ICA, which will use laser and slide projection to illuminate the building's former use as a prison for the Boston Police Department. To disrupt our own quotidian urban experience, An Unusually Bad Lot will be on public display evenings during selected dates between Dec. 30 and Jan. 12. Though the very nature of Attie's work makes it ephemeral, the ICA has ensured in this excellent presentation that these projections of lives won't simply vanish into silence, but urge us, through their presence, to remember.

Now through Jan. 16, 2000 at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Wed.-Sun. 12-5 p.m.; Thu. 12-9 p.m.; Fri. 12-7 p.m. An Unusually Bad Lot will be projected on the ICA facade from 5 to 10 p.m., Dec. 30 through Jan. 2 and Jan. 6 through Jan. 12.