Shimon Attie
Irlen (Time Laps Dance), 2021
UV cured acrylic ink on panel
16 x 28.5 inches
Edition of 4

Shimon Attie’s Time Laps Dance (2020 – 2021) comprises a three-channel video installation, a photo-print textile, and a series of photographs printed in UV-cured acrylic on panel, the latter of which were published by Magnolia Editions.

To create the imagery in Time Laps Dance, Attie collaborated with capoeiristas and dancers from the Brazilian State of Bahia’s national dance companies, who performed a re-working of the parodic vignette “Hitler on Ice” from the 1981 Mel Brooks film “History of the World, Part 1.” The artist reproduced every aesthetic element in the original film, from lighting and camera angles to framing and composition, but asked the dancers to draw their movements from the vocabularies of Afro-Ballet, Afro-Brazilian/Bahian contemporary dance, and Capoeira martial arts.

Attie notes: “By creating an unlikely, if subtle, collision between Brazilian dance and Hollywood satiric historical representations of Fascism, my intention in part was to give visual form to the shared American and Brazilian reality of nationalistic divisions that defines our political present.” — Nick Stone