Night Watch
Public Art
Night Watch
Night Watch was a silent film by Shimon Attie, centering New York’s refugees and asylum seekers. Projected on a 20-foot-wide LED screen aboard a utility vessel, the minimalist film featured moving portraits of individuals from diverse backgrounds. Developed through collaboration with legal aid organizations and community groups, Night Watch blended new media with community engagement, creating a powerful floating installation. The traveling route started in Staten Island, traversing the East and Hudson Rivers, potentially seen by millions along the Greater New York City waterfront. Night Watch raised awareness during the 73rd United Nations General Assembly.
When
September 20-28, 2018
Viewable from 5 PM to 9 PM for eight days.
Where
East River and Hudson River along the shores of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and New Jersey.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
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About the artist
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Night Watch is a short, silent film by Shimon Attie that brings center stage to New York’s refugees and asylum seekers, the city’s newest and most vulnerable inhabitants. Displayed on a 20-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall LED screen mounted aboard a large utility vessel, the high definition minimalist film is comprised of a series of moving portraits of individuals from a wide array of backgrounds and ages, all of whom come gradually into focus from the distance and gaze at the viewer poignantly, quietly, and powerfully.
Developed through research and collaboration with legal aid organizations such as Safe Passage Project and Immigration Equality, as well as community empowerment groups including Queer Detainee Empowerment Project and RIF Asylum Support, Night Watch blends new media technologies with community-based engagement and dialogue, creating a dramatic, resonant and cogent floating media installation.
The route of the traveling installation began each late-September evening in Staten Island, and slowly traveled up and down the East River and Hudson River along the shores of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and New Jersey, potentially sighted by millions of viewers on the waterfront of the Greater New York City area.
Night Watch was projected on a LED screen mounted on a barge, and was viewable from 5PM to 9PM for eight days starting Thursday, September 20 until Friday, September 28, during the 73rd United Nations General Assembly.
While conducting research for Night Watch, More Art engaged in many conversations with front line stakeholders in immigration rights. During this time, one fact stood out to us above all others: once a person escapes discrimination and violence in their country of origin, there are still hundreds of potential roadblocks that arise even long after that person enters the “safe harbor” of the United States. During our research, we also tracked our contact with NYC-based groups, organizations and institutions that, in myriad ways, stand up for immigrants rights. We have compiled a list of these organizations, in hopes that it will function as a tool both for people looking for direct legal support, as well as people interested in direct actions to support immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking communities. Click here to view the entire publication.
Shimon Attie
Shimon Attie is an internationally renowned visual artist.
His artistic practice includes creating site-specific installations in public places, accompanying art photographs, immersive multiple-channel video and mixed-media installations for museums and galleries, and new media works.
For two decades, Attie has made art that allows us to reflect on the relationship between place, memory and identity. In many of his projects, he engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures, and explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place and identity. He is particularly concerned with issues of loss, communal trauma and the potential for regeneration.
In earlier works, Attie has used contemporary media to re-animate architectural and public sites with images of their lost histories, and how histories of marginalized and forgotten communities may be visually introduced into the physical landscape of the present. These works ranged from on-location slide projections in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to underwater light boxes in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven Canal, to sophisticated laser projections illuminating the immigrant experience on tenement buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. Attie has described these works, in part, as “a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.”
In more recent years, Attie has also created a number of multiple-channel immersive HD video installations. These have included a commission by the BBC and the Arts Council of Wales to create a 5-channel video installation on the occasion of the 40-year anniversary since the Aberfan disaster, when the village became ‘famous’ after having lost nearly all of its children in a manmade avalanche that buried Aberan’s only elementary school. Attie also created Racing Clocks Run Slow: Archaeology of a Racetrack, a piece inspired by the former Bridgehampton Auto Racetrack in Bridgehampton, Long Island. In 2008, he completed a commission from San Francisco’s de Young Museum to create a new work of art. The result was a 3-channel video installation, Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum, which deals with the heightened moment of mutual encounter between art viewer and art object. And in 2011, Attie created MetroPAL.IS., an 8-channel video installation in-the-round for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum that involves members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities living in New York City. Following its exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, MetroPAL.IS. then traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Other more recent projects and commissions include Lost in Space (After Huck), an immersive multi-media Installation commissioned and exhibited by the St. Louis Art Museum in 2017, and an art film that Attie made with Syrian refugees who have recently arrived in Europe, many on rafts over the Mediterranean.
Attie’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Miami Art Museum, and The National Gallery of Art, among many others. A survey exhibition was organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.
Five commercial monographs have been published on Shimon Attie’s work, which has also been the subject of several films, which have aired on PBS, the BBC, and ARD.
Mr. Attie has received 11 year-long visual artist fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Academy in Rome (The Rome Prize), The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and Kunstfonds (Germany’s NEA equivalent).
Shimon Attie received his MFA degree in 1991. Since that time, Attie has received more than 25 commissions to create new works of art in more than ten countries around the world.
In 2013-14, Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award.
He is currently in the early stages of developing a new site-specific media Installation for New York City, scheduled to open in September, 2018.
Shimon Attie was born in Los Angeles California and lives and works in New York City.
Night Watch, Shimon Attie. 2018. East River, NY.
Shimon Attie, “Night Watch” (2018).
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shimon Attie, Night Watch, 2018.
Shooting moving image portraits as part of Shimon Attie’s project “Night Watch” (2018)
Shooting moving image portraits as part of Shimon Attie’s project “Night Watch” (2018)
Shooting moving image portraits as part of Shimon Attie’s project “Night Watch” (2018)
Shooting moving image portraits as part of Shimon Attie’s project “Night Watch” (2018)
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Public Programs
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Press
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Community Engagement
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Partners & Supporters
Night Watch broadside print
While conducting research for Night Watch, More Art engaged in many conversations with front line stakeholders in immigration rights. During this time, one fact stood out to us above all others: once a person escapes discrimination and violence in their country of origin, there are still hundreds of potential roadblocks that arise even long after that person enters the “safe harbor” of the United States. During our research, we also tracked our contact with NYC-based groups, organizations and institutions that, in myriad ways, stand up for immigrants rights. We have compiled a list of these organizations, in hopes that it will function as a tool both for people looking for direct legal support, as well as people interested in direct actions to support immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking communities. Click here to view the entire publication.
Thu, September 20, 2018 6:30-8:30 PM
Wagner Park, Battery Park City | Directions
Night Watch Opening
Opening of Night Watch, with artist Shimon Attie. More Art commissioned 2018 EA fellow Manuel Molina Martagon to create a food-based experience with ingredients from the seven countries banned by the Trump administration.
Sat, September 22, 2018 5:00-8:00 PM
Viewing Room at Jack Shainman Gallery (Directions) and Pier 63
In their own words: An evening with LGBTQ refugees
Please RSVP for this event on Eventbrite
Our afternoon started with readings from Bed 26: A Memoir of an African Man’s Asylum in The United States by project participant Edafe Okporo, and from Deep Inside These Walls by Carey Yee. Following the readings, project partner Immigration Equality led an informative conversation with attendees. Then Queer Detainee Empowerment Project directed a pen-pal letter writing workshop. At 7:15 PM, attendees walked to Pier 63 for a dance performance by project participant and Alvin Ailey’s dancer, Marvin Drummond, as Night Watch arrived.
Saturday, September 22, 2018 5:30-7:30 PM
Brook Park, 141 St and Brook Avenue, Bronx (Directions)
More Art co-sponsored the 31st anniversary party of La Peña at Brook Park in the South Bronx. Catch a different view of Night Watch, projected on the walls of this legendary community-stewarded garden space. The projection served as the background for a theatrical performance by ID Theater.
Music and dance performances presented by Mott-Haven based Latinx arts organization ID Studio:
- ArtsLatinoNY Ensemble, directed by Pablo Mayor
- Pajarillo Pinta’o Dance Company, directed by Daniel Fetecua
Thu, September 27, 2018 6:30-7:30 PM
Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 6
Closing celebration of Night Watch
Cruising New York’s Waterways This Week: Portraits of Former Refugees New York Times
Refugee Stories Told from a Barge, Timed for UN General Assembly Session Hyperallergic
Who are the people seeking political asylum in the US? The Art Newspaper
A New Film Featuring LGBTQ+ Asylum-Seekers Can Soon Be Seen Traveling New York’s Waterways IntoMore
Ronde de nuit Le Quotidien de l’Art
Rostros de la migración navegan en torno a Nueva York TeLoCuentoNews
Public Art That Wowed in 2018 Artwork Archive
53 NYC Outdoor Art Installations Not to Miss in September 2018 Untapped Cities
The Trump administration’s immigration-related executive orders had unique and potentially harmful implications for the LGBTQ+ and HIV-positive community. In nearly 80 countries around the world, it is a crime to be LGBTQ+. LGBTQ+ refugees turned away at our borders face death at home or in refugee camps. The increased use of detention centers for would-be asylees is particularly problematic because of the documented history of sexual and physical abuse endured by LGBTQ+ detainees.
Night Watch and the ecology of community engagement, outreach, and public programs supporting and extending the project’s reach, intended to expand the messaging of our core advocacy partners in order to increase visibility and advocacy around the following policy issues for youth and LGBTQ+ immigrants.
Immigration Equality
More Art was proud to partner with Immigration Equality to highlight the lives and stories of LGBTQ+ immigrants in our film Night Watch. Since 1994, Immigration Equality has been proud to advocate for and represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ), and HIV-positive immigrants seeking safety, fair treatment, and freedom.
For more than 20 years, they have been focused on providing free direct legal services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-positive immigrants. Immigration Equality has and continues to aid asylum seekers forced to flee to the U.S. to find safety, LGBTQ+ immigrant and binational couples and families separated by oceans, asylum seeks trapped in immigration detention facilities, and undocumented LGBTQ+ people living in the shadows within the U.S.
Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, assists LGBTQ+ people coming out of immigration detention in securing structural, health/wellness, educational, legal, and emotional support and services.
The Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP) is a post-release support, detention center visitation, direct service, and community organizing project that works with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Two Spirit, Trans, Intersex, Gender Non- Conforming, and HIV+ (LGBTQIA* GNC TS) immigrant prisoners and their families currently in detention centers, those that have been recently released from detention centers, and those at risk at entering immigration detention in the Tri-State Area (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York).
RIF Asylum Support
More Art was proud to collaborate with RIF Asylum Support — an asylum orientation organization providing legal workshops and support groups to asylum seekers in New York City. They work with many amazing individuals seeking asylum in the US and have helped connect families separated throughout the asylum application process.
Safe Passage Project
With the Safe Passage Project, More Art led an intensive photography workshop for the youth they represent. Workshops like this are designed to empower participants to shift narratives about their personal experiences.
The female-identifying participants learned about campaigns that have successfully overturned stereotypes, shifted dominant narratives, and changed how people understand each other. More Art commissioned teaching artist Vanessa Teran to lead this workshop. During the workshop, the group developed their own campaign slogan and executed a photo shoot. Basic photography vocabulary and techniques were covered. After a guest presentation by Shimon Attie, Teran worked with participants to light and compose unique photographs in a way that communicates the campaign message. The workshop goal was meant to empower positive self-representation. Some of the images can be seen below.
Partners
More Art is proud to partner with Immigration Equality, Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, RIF Asylum Support, Safe Passage Project, and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
Supporters
Night Watch and accompanied public programs were supported in part by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, Lambent Foundation, New York Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and generous individual donations.
Night Watch was made possible through support by Chemistry Creative. Chemistry Creative is a Full Service Production Company and Studio Rental Complex in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They specialize in Experiential Production, Audio Visual Systems, Scenic Design and Custom Fabrication.
To learn more about Chemistry Creative, their services, and what projects they are involved in check out their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.