Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow

“Like many Radcliffe fellows, I’ve had many different fellowships and residencies. There’s something that’s absolutely unique about Radcliffe, which is the breadth of disciplines. You have everything from physics to poetry. A couple of physicists in my fellowship class were writing novels, and my racing piece, Racing Clocks Run Slow, was actually based on a law of physics.

“The Institute offers a protective cocoon that allows for peace of mind and time that’s free of distraction, so that an artist can do focused and concentrated work. It’s a wonderful arena in which to really push oneself and one’s work.”

Installation artist and photographer Shimon Attie RI ’07—whose work has been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris—uses sound and projection to create site-specific works that evoke their locations’ past.

As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Attie worked simultaneously on three projects: The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan—An Anatomy of a Welsh Village, a five-channel video installation about a village that lost most of its children in a man-made avalanche forty years earlier; Racing Clocks Run Slow: Archaeology of a Racetrack, a three-channel, high-definition video installation about the Bridgehampton Auto Race Track that is loosely based on time dilation, the law of physics that states that as an object nears the speed of light, time slows down; and A Tale of Nobel Dreams, a large-scale installation commemorating the Oslo Peace Accords.

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