CARDIFF.- On 21 October 1966, a coal waste tip slipped down the mountainside above Aberfan, burying its only elementary school and many homes. As a result, 116 children and 28 adults lost their lives. Within hours of the disaster – and ever since - the village lost its privacy as the worldwide news media descended upon it.
40 years later, American artist Shimon Attie was invited to come to Aberfan by the community and BBC Wales to help the people living there move on. After three months of living in the village and another three months working in Cardiff, Shimon Attie created The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - An Anatomy of a Welsh Village which will be on show at
National Museum Cardiff from 6 December 2008 until 22 February 2009.
Memory and community are central to the artist’s five channel video installation which depicts the Welsh village of Aberfan in 2006. Asking the question ‘What does it take to make a Welsh Village? Attie invited villagers into his studio and asked them to assume statuory poses which reflect their social or occupational role within the village. Villagers ‘performed’ being themselves, while Shimon Attie filmed them on an unseen slowly revolving stage. Each participant was illuminated by delicate and beautiful lighting reminiscent of Old Master paintings. The resulting ‘cast’ included an ex-coal miner, a headmaster, a fish-and-chips man, a boxer, male choir singers, a bartender and many more.
No actors or digital effects were employed in the making of the artwork as Attie explains:
“My aim was to create a body of images that competes with and upends the historical archive of existing imagery and that complicates the conversation about a place such as Aberfan,” said Shimon Attie. “I wanted the piece to confound our expectations and projections onto what it means to be a “victim” or a “survivor,” and to resist easy interpretation and sentimentality. Ultimately, I wanted to create an artwork that – at least in the realm of the imaginary - might help Aberfan take its rightful place as a Welsh village among other Welsh villages.”
Seen for the first time at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in September 2008, the next destination for The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan – An Anatomy of a Welsh Village which received support from the Welsh Assembly Government as well as lottery funding through the Arts Council of Wales and the Heritage Lottery Fund will be National Museum Cardiff from December 2008. The creation of Shimon Attie’s work was the subject of a BBC Wales documentary called An American in Aberfan, which will also be screened to complement the display.
The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - An Anatomy of a Welsh Village extends Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’ aspiration to promote contemporary art within the Museum. Throw (2004) by Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg is a humorous yet provoking record of private acts of protest by individuals on the street, interspersed with stills from large-scale public protests in Helsinki. Throw was shortlisted for the prestigious Artes Mundi prize in 2006 and was acquired for the Museum's collection through the Derek Williams Trust Artes Mundi Purchase Prize. On display at the same time as Shimon Attie’s work, it underlines the importance of film and video in contemporary art practice today.
Shimon Attie is well known for his installations that incorporate projected photography and other contemporary media into and onto architectural sites. His past works have given visual form to memory and the human imagination by animating public sites with images of their lost histories, and in more recent years, as the current exhibition attests, by creating multiple-channel video installations. Attie’s work explores questions of memory, place, and identity and the themes of layered and buried histories.
Born in Los Angeles in 1957 Attie received his Master of Fine Arts degree from San Francisco State University in 1991. He has received international recognition for video, photography, new media, and public art installations and has exhibited his work in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the US and abroad at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Miami Art Museum; and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Attie has received a number of visual artist fellowships including from the American Academy in Rome (The Rome Prize), the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. Attie lives and works in New York City.
