Willie Doherty, Closure, 2005.
Willie Doherty, who was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1959, is currently enjoying one of the largest museum surveys of his work to date as well as representing Northern Ireland in one of the most talked about exhibitions at the Venice Biennale. In order to do justice to the evolution of Doherty's impressive oeuvre, the Hamburg Kunstverein and the Lenbachhaus Munich have developed two different, complementary exhibitions that together present a representative selection of Doherty's work from the start of his career in the early 1990s to the present day. Willie Doherty will be giving a lecture about his work on Thursday, 26 July at 7 pm.
In his often large-scale single- and multi-channel videos, Willie Doherty offers political and aesthetic images of Ireland that challenge widespread misconceptions of pristine natural landscapes as well as biased coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict. The voice over in certain works, for instance, switches identity between offender and victim. Doherty's concern is not so much to tie down events and interpretations as to pinpoint archetypal features of the conflict. The traces of conflict that the videos capture--for instance deserted and wrecked buildings, or roadblocks--are also always viewed ambivalently, both as provocation for and as the consequence of actions. This shifting of perspectives and roles is in keeping with the reception that Doherty's often dualistically conceived works invite: perception of them is optimal when one moves around the exhibition space, directing attention at one of two screens then at the other.
Willie Doherty, 'Non-Specific Threat', 2004
Willie Doherty, 'Re-Run', 2004
Doherty's works have a remarkable ability to reach out beyond the specifically Northern Irish conflict and deal at a sophisticated level with general topics such as the surveillance of public space, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and national and religious conflicts. While Doherty's stylistic devices are wide-ranging, all of his works share a high degree of suggestive visual invention and also the fascinating ambivalence of what at first sight appears to be unambiguous. A seemingly ominous figure, such as the man with shaved head in Non-Specific Threat (2004), for instance, whom the camera circles to the accompaniment of a voiceover, is both active and reactive, fictional and real, past and future. His words invoke situations ranging from menace to intimacy. The man could be a participant in the Northern Ireland conflict, or he could also be a plain human being--a worker, a student, a sportsman.
It is precisely this productive ambiguity that implicates the viewer at a level that is not only emotional but also intellectual, and reveals that those fears of possible violence and the paranoiac projections vis-a-vis the supposedly strange and unfamiliar are by no means confined to Northern Ireland.
Willie Doherty
Until 2 September
Kunstverein in Hamburg
Klosterwall 23
20095 Hamburg, Germany
T: +49 40 33 83 44
www.kunstverein.de
Willie Doherty
29 September to 6 January 2008
Lenbachhaus, Munich
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