Willie Doherty, UNSEEN

U N S E E N

U N S E E N

Derry 1985

U N S E E N Willie Doherty

Matt’s Gallery, London Nerve Centre, Derry

Contents

6

Foreword — Robin Klassnik

8

‘And so they are ever returning to us, the dead’ Willie Doherty in Derry — Susan McKay

16

Border — Colm Tóibín

18

Seeing Beyond the Pale: The Photographic Works of Willie Doherty — Jean Fisher

31

Derry and the Donegal Border 1985 – 2013

250

Reflections — Jean Fisher

259

Appendices

5

ROBIN KLASSNIK

FOREWORD

All that I know and understand of Derry and the wider history of Northern Ireland, I have learned through the lens of Willie Doherty.

Doherty’s continuous and probing investigation of the politics and representations of his native Northern Ireland have set him apart as one of the most important artists of his generation. His work is rooted within political discourse and directs attention to the nature of the language by which conflict is represented and communicated in our society.

‘UNSEEN’ presents for the very first time works produced by Doherty that were specifically made on and in response to the streets of his native city of Derry and its surrounding hinterland. In showing key photographic and video works spanning from 1985 to the present day, ‘UNSEEN’ offers new insight into Doherty’s working methods and rationale.

Since 1985, Doherty, through the simple acts of walking and looking, has explored and recorded the way in which Derry has been shaped and altered in response to unfolding political events within the city’s walls and beyond. The exhibition title, ‘UNSEEN’, refers to Doherty’s self-conscious method of using the camera in a context where it is imperative for him to avoid undue attention and to minimise the risk of being mistaken for a photojournalist or a tourist. ‘UNSEEN’ reveals Doherty’s re-appropriation of photojournalism methods, documentary landscape photography and the means of employing image and text to create a body of photographic work that explores the fine line between fact and fiction.

I first showed Doherty’s work in the winter of 1990, in the exhibition ‘Same Difference’. We started working together at a time when the IRA had escalated its campaign in Britain.

‘Same Difference’ followed almost a year on from the British government’s broadcast media ban on Sinn Féin and seven other proscribed Republican and Loyalist organisations. The ban was justified, at the time, as a necessary measure that Margaret Thatcher hoped would ‘starve the IRA of the oxygen supply of publicity’. In the absence of media exposure however, the IRA did not disappear, and the media in fact became the key

public platform where long-standing and entrenched attitudes were reinforced and remained unchallenged. The ban was subsequently lifted in 1994.

Using four 35 mm slide projectors, Same Difference presented static images with changing texts, projected onto two of the gallery walls. The show uncovered the emotive use of language that surrounded the media image of Northern Ireland and the IRA within the propaganda war at that time.

In 1993, I commissioned Doherty to make his first video installation, the double-screen work, The Only Good One is a Dead One (p. 253). This exhibition resulted in Doherty’s first of two Turner Prize nominations (his second in 2003 for the piece Re-Run (2002), which features in ‘UNSEEN’).

This publication, beautifully designed by Tony Waddingham, presents for the very first time a comprehensive document of all Doherty’s photographs taken in and around Derry between 1985 and the present day. Jean Fisher’s seminal text from 1990 on Doherty’s early photographic works, ‘Seeing Beyond the Pale’, has been re-printed for the occasion of this exhibition. Fisher then revisits this text in a new essay, ‘Reflections’, that provides an overview of how Doherty’s work has evolved and responded to the changing socio-political context in Derry. ‘Reflections’ was penned following a recent visit to Derry with the artist, Fisher’s first since writing the original essay in 1990. Renowned Irish author Colm Tóibín reflects on the now invisible border between the North and South of Ireland. In revisiting his own experience of walking along the Irish border, he mirrors Doherty’s continuing engagement with this landscape. A very personal and haunting account by Susan McKay, the award winning Irish journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Bear in Mind These Dead, explores the current situation in Derry in the difficult aftermath of the conflict.

My sincere thanks go to Pearse Moore, Chief Executive of Nerve Centre, Derry and co-curator of ‘UNSEEN’, who recognised that the work of Willie Doherty should be at the heart of the first UK City of Culture 2013 in Derry / Londonderry. Pearse has been an integral force within the development and championing of

this project and also Doherty’s wider practice, and specifically as producer of all his videos since Re-Run in 2002. My warm gratitude goes to Willie’s long-time assistant, Sue MacDiarmid, for her generosity and dedicated professionalism in installing the exhibition. ‘UNSEEN’ is realised with the generous loan of works from Tate, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Arts Council Collection, London and National Museums Northern Ireland. None of this could have happened without the continual encouragement and support from all of Willie Doherty’s galleries: Alexander and Bonin, New York; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid.

‘UNSEEN’ has been a wonderful journey through the works of Willie Doherty. He remains a calm, thoughtful and generous friend.

7

S U S A N M C K AY

‘ A N D S O T H E Y A R E E V E R RETURNING TO US, THE DEAD’¹ Willie Doherty in Derry

‘ It has become a distant memory Taken on the characteristics of a dream At times I am unsure if it really happened at all…’ ­— Willie Doherty 2

‘ In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.’

— W. G. Sebald 3

Imagine if Derry were a city of angels.

One of Willie Doherty’s early photographs (p. 45) shows a tangle of oak leaves taut with hoarfrost, with, inscribed in green across it, the beautiful line attributed to Saint Columba, ‘crowded full of heaven’s angels is every leaf of the oaks of derry’.

Embossed in larger letters underneath is the inscription: ‘mesh’.

This word (the photograph’s title) suggests wire, fortifications, trouble. Doherty’s aesthetic vision tends towards conflict.

In the summer of 2013 in a playground in Derry, an eleven-yearold child was badly burned when, it appears, older boys threw a petrol bomb at him. In talking to a reporter, a local woman said of some children that they were ‘no angels’. The boy later told his mother that there were women who had seen him on fire and walked away. No angels either.

Crossing the Diamond inside Derry’s walls, I was passing the War Memorial, its bronze soldier in a First World War greatcoat fiercely bayoneting the rain, when I noticed that I was walking on oak leaves. As eleven-year-olds, our history teacher at Londonderry High School told us that the air we breathed in Derry was the air that Saint Columba had also breathed. That was in 1968.

The ‘Picturing Derry’ exhibition, shown this year as part of Derry’s year as City of Culture 2013, included many photographs of children hurling petrol bombs back in those days, when rage was communal. Excited middle-aged visitors at the exhibition were searching for themselves in the photographs. ‘Look! There’s wee Martin McGuinness sitting on a wall!’. A woman pointed out a child in shorts, who, along with other boys, was carrying a plank across waste ground. ‘That’s my father in law!’ she said.

It is troubling to consider why a generation born after ceasefires, settlements and the establishment of political institutions, has been handed on the art of making petrol bombs, why a child should be so horrifically attacked. After the Quinn children were murdered in Ballymoney in 1998, a lady from a large bungalow whispered to me: ‘There was more to that than meets the eye…

You wouldn’t know what goes on in these housing estates.’ 5 We are inclined to prefer nostalgia to history. The song, ‘The Town I Loved So Well’ is iconic, so it was probably inevitable that it was chosen to open the big inaugural concert for the City of Culture. Derry hearts swell with pride and tears fill Derry eyes as Phil Coulter sings: ‘And we saw it through without complaining…’

Really? Like hell we did. ‘ This is how the centuries work – Two steps forward, one step back…’

‘ Columba’s Derry!

— Derek Mahon 6

ledge of angels radiant oakwood where the man dove knelt to master his fiery temper.’

— John Montague 4

Doherty’s video, Remains, 2013 (p. 9), begins with footage of a fiercely blazing car, and ends as the flames die down, the wreckage of the car smouldering in the twilight. The narrator, voiced by Adrian Dunbar, tells of how he was subjected to kneecappings as

a boy, and how he ends up bringing along his son to be similarly punished. The crimes of the father are unspecified, as are those of the son. The paramilitary perpetrators are not named. The video arose following on from the project ‘Lost Boys’, a collaboration between Doherty and I for Field Day Review.7 We met up with self designated ‘wee hoods’ in Derry housing estates. They talked about things that had happened in their families during the Troubles. We saw the places to which their kind were summonsed for punishment: ‘For my sins’, says the narrator of Remains.

‘What sins?’ 8 Doherty is an artist who feels that he has an ethical responsibility to deal with the social and political contexts in the place that he lives.9 He admires W. G. Sebald, whose books combine narrative which is apparently documentary with photographs claimed by the story but that have a strangely random air about them. Critics struggle with the categorisation of Sebald’s work, but his own term: ‘documentary fiction’ seems apt also for Doherty’s photographic work. The stories indicated by Doherty’s pictures are, he has told me, ‘not necessarily true’. 10 It was interesting to work with him on ‘Lost Boys’. As a journalist, I was used to working side by side with press photographers, and we would mostly want portraits of people in locations.

When I was interviewing people for the Field Day Review piece, Doherty came along with me. People brought us to places where events they talked about had happened. Doherty listened quietly, looked around, did not take photographs. His interest is primarily in what he calls ‘terrain’. His practice was to then return, alone, to the places we had visited, to do his work.

The work in this exhibition presents a Derry which is ‘unseen’ even though it is self evidently visible. Doherty locates his work in places that are edited out of other images of the city: marginal places, out of the way places, discarded places. The scenes are neither conventionally beautiful, nor picturesque. There is much that is ugly in these images, and their mood is often desolate. His photographs of ruined and abandoned concrete maisonettes will never become postcards. Nor do they readily yield a documentary meaning, although it should be shocking that the estates

built to house Derry’s poorest citizens are basic, shoddy and bleak. Doherty does not photograph political graffiti, favouring instead words that are illegible. The ground is stained, littered with rubbish. No evidence is presented that the events alluded to in titles of photographs such as Silence: After a Kneecapping, 1985 / 2012 (p. 225), actually took place. Yet his work confronts us with the uncomfortable realisation that this is a Derry we know and recognise, though we generally choose not to acknowledge it.

Some of the world’s best war photographers have been to Derry. I dislike the snobbery that art critics often demonstrate in their references to news photographers. They are not inferior to art photographers, they are simply doing a different job – one which is under threat now that reporters are expected to film and take photos on their mobiles. Some of the images from the early days of the Troubles taken by great photographers such as Gilles Caron, are now part of the fabric of Derry, copied by muralists onto the walls of the flats around Free Derry Corner.

Doherty has deliberately avoided the dramatic manifestations of conflict: ‘I wanted to slow things down a bit… I wanted things to be banal and restrained,’ he said.11 I remember attending an Apprentice Boys march in Derry, which was expected to end in serious trouble, coming, as it did, at the end of a summer of march-related violence. Tension had been building. Camera crews from all the big international news agencies were there,

Remains, 2013

9

geared up and ready for action. When no riot actually took place, their consternation was palpable. The next day, pictures appeared of children throwing petrol bombs. No one knew where the photographs had been taken.

Doherty’s images of strife and deprivation are rooted in the day-to-day life of Derry and in its history. What they tell us is less immediate, more complex. A journalist friend, who had reported for years on the Troubles, told me that she had once been so stricken by a sense of evil at the corner of a particular street that she had been compelled to hail a taxi to get away from it. Like Sebald, Doherty is concerned with the question of how history marks a terrain; of the persistence of memory in buildings and landscapes. Some of Doherty’s photographs suggest that there are places so poisoned by violent history that human beings cannot thrive there: ‘I wondered what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there. Had it been absorbed or filtered into the ground or was it possible for others to sense it as I did?’ 12 Not long ago, I found myself walking through a terrain I recognised, with intense disquiet, to be Doherty’s. I had been working

Dead Pool I, 2011

in Derry and had set out for what I thought would be a pleasant summer stroll. The idea was to pass some time before visiting a friend living just across the border in Donegal. It was a sunny day.

A cheerful looking sign pointed over a stile, towards a field and into trees along the River Foyle. I had not gone far before a feeling of anxiety came over me, a sense that this was a place where bad things happened. It was dark in the shadow of the trees, and cold. I could hear occasional bursts of male voices whooping and shouting, and sounds of heavy running somewhere in the forest: ‘The trees behind me were filled with shadow-like figures. Looks of terror and bewilderment filled their eyes…’ 13 The only people I met were hurrying back in the direction from which I had come. The track stretched out ahead of me, its broken tar surface mossed over at the edges, from which, occasionally, tunnel-like paths led into dense clumps of conifer. What if someone comes after me, I thought? What if I am captured? Struck down? No one knows I have come here. They will not know where to search for me. Later, perhaps, someone will find my car… I could already see the vehicle on the news, parked up a country road under a hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle, forensic officers moving purposefully around it in their white overalls.

A Northern Irish upbringing and years of working as a Troubles journalist have left their mark: I have a disposition for paranoia.

Doherty is a kindred spirit in this regard. I had been to see his exhibition ‘Disturbance’ at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2011, which included old and new work. Sometimes I Imagine it’s My Turn, 1998, was there: a meditation on what it would be like to be assassinated. When we were working together in 2013, we spoke about this: ‘You know the way you wonder if you might get killed, and you speculate about how and where it might happen?’, Doherty asked me. ‘Yes’, I replied. The installation The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (p. 253), takes its title from one of the most hateful of sectarian convictions, one that Doherty says he has heard from bigots on both sides of the divide. The work considers the matter from the point of view both of the victim and the killer. It is about coming to terms with living in a war zone, and consequently, the need to be alert, to make the right decisions

for moral and physical survival. ‘My work is my way of thinking about the place and the politics’, he said. ‘This private activity became public because the work is exhibited and has an audience.’ 14 Doherty and I are close in age. Born in the late 1950s, our childhood preceded the conflict but it flared just as we were becoming teenagers, only subsiding when we were on the threshold of middle age. Long shadows. Doherty, who chose to stay in Northern Ireland and to return to Derry after his years at art college in Belfast, has described the way that the everyday fear of violence is mostly dealt with in silence. For him, ‘making this work was a personal resistance to feeling like a victim.’ 15 Doherty uses words like ‘interrogate’ and ‘excavate’ when describing his intent and his practice. Colin Graham notes that Doherty’s work reminds us that the condition of being constantly under surveillance ‘disturbed the subconscious’. Graham quotes Doherty: ‘The things one cannot see are those that impinge most on your life… that you are being watched… You cannot photograph these things. They are not public. They are not seen. How can one photograph a psychological state that you experience daily[?]’ 16 His work provides a response: his images provoking an intense sense of being watched, while also making us vigilant, watchful, alert for signs of crimes we hardly wish to contemplate but which we know to our sorrow have been committed, perhaps even in our name.

Photographs like Disturbance, Dead Pool (p. 10) and Seepage (all 2011), find us scouring around in a lonely bog like members of a police forensic team. We are looking for a body, contemplating what might be the site of a turf stack or grave; straining to make out what could be an arm in a pool of brackish water, wondering for a moment if that white handle-shaped object near a clump of black plastic is actually a bone. This disturbing quest takes on a surreal dimension when we find ourselves noticing that a rut in the track filled with muddy water is in fact in the shape of a recumbent human form. These images fill us with foreboding.

In the video Buried, 2009 (p. 11), viewers find themselves searching for signs of a violent crime in a landscape that seems to offer clues at every turn: an abandoned sleeping bag on a tree trunk, embers from a campfire, a shotgun pellet, a noose. The scene is gothic – a shady forest floor with wood smoke lingering, and in the background, a strange, sorrowful howling which, Doherty later told me, is a slowed-down audio recording of rioting in Derry. Moira Jeffrey, reviewing Doherty’s work in the Scotsman, referred to the suggestion in Doherty’s work that photography is inherently unreliable, and called Buried: ‘one of the most terrifying and ambiguous films you will ever see’.17 Ghost Story, 2007 (p. 11), a video narrated by Stephen Rea and with camera work by Seamus McGarvey, is similarly haunted and similarly haunts. When I told Doherty about my recent

Buried, 2009

Ghost Story, 2007

11

experience on the deserted path near the River Foyle, he said that I had been at one of the locations they had used in the video. My memory of that powerfully suggestive work must have stirred up my inherent fear. Ghost Story includes the memory of a massacre that took place ‘on a bright but cold January afternoon’. The narrator states that he has returned to the scene, but that he can find few traces of what he first saw with his own eyes. The ground has since been built on.

Doherty has spoken about his own traumatic witnessing of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, when he was twelve years old.

He saw something happen – the massacre of thirteen people – a fact that was then, and for many years thereafter, officially denied. However, he told me that the part he still finds the most unsettling is his own uncertainly about the specifics of what he remembers seeing. I know others who have had similarly troubling problems. A friend was sure she had witnessed something that everyone told her she could not have seen because, they said, it did not happen. A news photographer told me that his difficulty lay in the fact that certain of his pictures were to be used as evidence – but he had no recollection of taking them.

Derry is a city of mirrors, the two sides of the community, the two sides of the Foyle, the two sides of the border, the inside and the outside of the walls. Doherty has had a longtime preoccupation with duality, with images that mirror each other and yet reflect a difference perceived to be so extreme as to provoke murderous hatred and violence. There are those in the North who assert that they can tell if someone is from ‘the other side’ just by looking at them. As in, ‘there is something about their eyes…’ Others will not enter into conversation until crucial information has been extracted. Michael Ignatieff has written about this in the context of Serbia, describing how it is precisely in circumstances where there is no visible difference that the ethnic killer ‘must do a certain violence to himself to make the mask of hatred fit.’ 18 In his video Non-Specific Threat, 2004 (p. 12), Doherty uses a 360-degree pan to present a moving portrait of a man, for which the actor Colin Stewart posed. The viewer can scrutinise the male head – craggy and bald – from every angle, but it remains inscrutable. The accompanying text is full of disorientating contradictions: ‘ I am fictional.

I am the reflection of all your fears.

I am real.’ 19

I come from the ‘other side’ from Doherty. Brought up Protestant, on the Waterside of Derry, my experience of Bloody Sunday is markedly different. No one in my family was on the civil rights march that day and no one belonging to my community was killed. It happened just down the road from Londonderry High School, but was not talked about or even acknowledged in any formal way when we returned to class through the shocked silence of Catholic Derry. Yet, I find, reading my diaries from that time, that Bloody Sunday seems to have transformed my consciousness too. In the midst of much agonising about exams and boys, there is an entry in January 1974, which furiously comments on the BBC’s description of Bloody Sunday, as its second anniversary approached: ‘when thirteen people died in crossfire Non-Specific Threat, 2004

between the IRA and the army’. This, my sixteen-year-old self protested, was ‘rubbish’.

My best friend lived close to the Donegal / Derry border, and we used to take long walks around the roads there. Once, in the no man’s land on the Derry side of the customs post, we peeled some little stickers from a bullet-pocked road sign which declared that ‘you are now entering Northern Ireland’. They had the figure ‘13’ embossed in black on a green shamrock. I still have one of them. What strange vocabularies we have, those who grew up in Derry in those times. What strange geographies. No man’s land.

Control zone. No-go area. Unapproved road. These are the places Doherty haunts.

Doherty’s work evokes in me a homesickness for Derry, which far from being nostalgic, is shot through with grief. I left Derry in 1975 to go to university in Dublin and felt that I was being set free. It was an illusion, and in 1981, I returned to the North, to Belfast rather than Derry, afflicted by a need to learn to know my place. It seemed imperative to do something that engaged with the violence. Along with others, I set up a rape crisis centre. Years later, I became the Northern editor of a Sunday newspaper. I wrote the book, Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People, published in 2000, in an effort to understand and thereby explain the role of ‘the people I uneasily call my own’ in the disaster of the Northern conflict.20 I wrote another book, Bear in Mind These Dead, about the aftermath of the conflict, the sorrowful legacy of the killing years for those bereaved.21 I share Doherty’s preoccupation with the unresolved, the buried, the hidden legacies. Hence our collaboration. ‘Lost Boys’ included the story of the search for Columba McVeigh, who was ‘disappeared’ – meaning abducted, murdered and secretly buried on the border.

Reviewing Doherty’s work, Moira Jeffrey also refers to the poet Seamus Deane’s book, Reading in the Dark, which is set in Derry: ‘the unnamed child narrator grows up in a household echoing with secrets, haunted by ghosts,’ Jeffrey writes. ‘The family home is simultaneously empty and bereft, yet…’, and she then quotes Deane, ‘as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it’. Jeffrey notes that the

boy’s family ‘has been irretrievably burned by its proximity to conflict’, and quotes Deane again: ‘It felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire.’ 22 Dangerous fires, Doherty suggests, may smoulder down, but they are inclined to flare up again. In the last interview Sebald gave before his sudden death in 2001, he spoke to Maya Jaggi about the centrality of memory in art: ‘To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life.’ 23 Deane’s poem ‘Return’ describes a train journey from Belfast to Derry, which is also a return to memory and the snare of the poet’s past. The train curves around the River Foyle and into the city where the tracks end: ‘ I am in Derry once again.

Once more I turn to greet Ground that flees from my feet.’ 24

Doherty, too, has explored this tendency of Derry to run away from settled definition. One of his earliest well-known works, the photograph The Other Side, 1988 (p. 55), captures the madness of what Colin Graham has called, in the context of Doherty’s work, Derry’s ‘psychogeography’. Somewhere in this beautifully composed shot, invisible, non-existent, but potent and politically real, is the Border which gives rise to the twin follies of ‘west is south’ and ‘east is north’. His photograph, Shifting Ground, 1991 (p. 69), shows the then derelict roadway that runs along the interior of the fortified city walls, their cannons poking out underneath the tall metal fence erected after the twentiethcentury phase of Derry’s troubles erupted. The inner side of the roadway is enclosed by another high fence, creating a dead zone between the Bogside, outside of the walls, and the old city on the inside.

13

Graham discusses the potential significance of this space: ‘a sense that mutually allergic relations of definition are obsessively absorbed in “the other side” and that the continually lateral look which their binary view of the world insists on can be shaken by looking at the spaces where they meet, and shaken conceptually by looking down, by finding a way to shift the ground on which they stand.’ 25 This, he proposes, is where Doherty is searching for the ways in which his art can undermine cultural constrictions. Some of the early work is explicitly political in intent, notably work produced in artistic protest against broadcasting bans in Britain and in Ireland. Doherty’s images from the 1980s using landscape to undermine the texts layered over them (the texts reflecting the cultural certainties of the two sides) have become famous. ‘I wanted to interrogate the conventional images of Derry’, he said. ‘Then, ironically, my images became part of the convention.’ 26 By the early 1990s, Doherty’s work was being shown internationally, and he felt the need to broaden his vision away from the very specific contexts of his earlier work. He had also learned to drive, which precipitated a period of exploring border roads between Derry and Donegal, roads in many cases blocked by ‘dragons teeth’ made of concrete installed by the British Army to prevent the IRA using the route – roads littered with burned out cars. These were the badlands. As Colm Tóibín has noted in his essay in this book, this was ‘a landscape of endings’.27 The paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 were followed by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and by the establishment of the current political regime at Stormont in 2007. Doherty’s anxious protagonist is still unsure of his ground, scouring the border for signs that the conflict is not yet over, preoccupied with what is unseen but pervasive, the sense of loss and also of murderous energies that may not yet have abated. His photograph Wire Fence and Blue Sky, 2004 (p. 205), seems like a marvellous metaphor for the changed times. A spiked metal fence has at some stage in the past been reinforced and heightened by the addition of a wire mesh fence behind it. This lighter fence has become torn, so that through it can be seen a lake of

clear blue sky. It is possible to begin, tentatively, to imagine the absence of fortifications.

In 2012, Doherty became interested in the idea of time lapses and memory lapses. He embarked on a search through part of the archive of photographs he had taken in the 1980s and 1990s but never printed. Among them he found several which are reproduced in this book, including To the Border: A Fork in the Road, 1986 / 2012 (p. 227). ‘I made the original in 1986 but I had actually forgotten I took it,’ he told me. ‘Last year when I discovered it, I remembered that in 2010, there had been an incident at exactly that place.’ 28 The body of a dissident republican from Derry was dumped there after he was taken away from his home and killed, probably by other dissidents. The story goes that he was involved in the drugs trade, and that perhaps he was seen as an informer.

Doherty’s photograph is now uncanny, haunted by a murder that had not yet taken place.

Doherty likes the adjective ‘liminal’, meaning a barely perceptible sensory threshold; an indeterminate boundary. The wonderfully named Flyover: Ghost Walk, 1985 / 2012 (p. 221), has this quality. It is exhilarating and strangely moving. The composition is extraordinary: a swirl of roads, pillars, fences and walls, taken from an unprepossessing concrete underpass below the dark line of Derry’s city walls. The ground is spattered, and the walls and pillars are marked with slogans that have been painted out – crudely painted letters, and a man’s photograph on what looks like a torn election poster. What may be a mural is blurred in the background, shapes of blocks of 1970s flats behind it.

Nothing can be clearly understood about this terrain, yet there is a sense of walking into the light, all lines leading the eye towards something dazzling ahead, where the new wall skirts the curve of the old fortification. Ghosts, maybe. Or angels flocking home to roost in the oaks of Derry. Or a trick of the fading light and the enveloping mist that Doherty, ever vigilant, ever wandering, was miraculously there to capture.

NOTES

1. Sebald, W. G., The Emigrants, London: Vintage, 2002, p. 23.

2. See: Willie Doherty, Remains, 2013, high definition video, colour and sound, 15 mins.

3. Sebald, W. G., Austerlitz, London: Penguin Books, 2001, p. 109.

4. Montague, John, ‘A New Siege’, in Rage for Order, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1992, p. 36.

5. McKay, Susan, Northern Protestants, An Unsettled People, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2000, pp. 238–239.

6. Mahon, Derek, ‘Derry Morning’, in Selected Poems, London: Penguin Books, 2000, p. 73.

7. McKay, S. and Doherty, W., ‘Lost Boys’, in Field Day Review, Special Issue, Autumn 2013 (forthcoming).

8. See: Willie Doherty, Remains, 2013, op. cit.

9. Doherty in conversation with the author, 20 July, 2013.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. See: Willie Doherty, Ghost Story, 2007, high definition video, colour and sound, 15 mins.

13. Ibid.

14. Doherty in conversation with the author, 20 July, 2013.

15. Doherty, W., ‘Barbara Dawson in conversation with Willie Doherty, 23 July, 2011’, in Willie Doherty: Disturbance, Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2011, p. 40.

16. Doherty, W., quoted in Graham, Colin, Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography, Belfast: Belfast Exposed Photography and The MAC, 2013, p. 33.

17. Jeffrey, Moira, ‘Art Review: Willie Doherty, Buried’, Scotland on Sunday, 3 May, 2009. See: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/visual-arts/ art-review-willie-doherty-buried-1-1352289.

18. Ignatieff, Michael, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 51.

19. See, Willie Doherty, Non-Specific Threat, 2004, video, colour and sound, 7 : 46 mins.

20. McKay, S., Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2005 edition, p. 362.

21. McKay, S., Bear in Mind These Dead, London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 2007.

22. Jeffrey, M., ‘Art Review: Willie Doherty, Buried’, op. cit.

23. Jaggi, Maya, ‘The Last Word’, The Guardian, 21 December, 2001.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsand humanities.highereducation.

24. Deane, Seamus, ‘ “Return” ’, in Rage for Order – Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1992, p. 44.

25. Graham, C., ‘Inscription | Trace’, in Willie Doherty: Disturbance, op. cit., p. 11.

26. Doherty in conversation with the author, 20 July, 2013.

27. See Colm Tóibín, ‘Border’, in this volume, pp. 16–17.

28. Doherty in conversation with the author, 20 July, 2013.

15

COLM TÓIBÍN

BORDER

There is a thinning of the air, a gradual scarcity in the light. It is as though nothing has happened here for a long time and the land has folded in on itself. There is also an untidiness – an abandoned car rusting away, say, or some decaying farm buildings, or some farm machinery lying in long grass, not used for a long time. Or weeds growing wilder than usual. And a stillness, things petering out. A landscape of endings.

In the summer and autumn of 1986, I walked along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I began in Derry and ended in Louth. Ten years later I returned with a BBC producer to make a series of radio programmes. By that time there had been many changes. Some bridges had been re-built, for example, and some crossings re-opened, and there even had been some landscaping done to disguise the way in which the border, even when it was a thin invisible line, seemed to have maimed the very landscape itself. Thus the peace which came meant that some towns and villages were re-united with their hinterland.

Some of the menace in the air had disappeared.

But even now, years later, the improvements seem cosmetic rather than authentic. Ninety years of partition have made too deep a difference to the landscape where Derry meets Donegal, and Fermanagh meets Leitrim and Monaghan, and Armagh meets Louth, to be easily papered over. The dividing line seems, at times, etched into the way things are; the border is, or appears, almost permanent, always palpable.

This sense of a place marked by partition is not confined to the rural landscape, although it can be very intense there. It lives also in some towns, and in the city of Derry. It is easy to see Derry as a set of enclaves, or as a palimpsest of certain events from history, including recent history. But it is hard sometimes also not to imagine what the city might look like were it, in fact, to be part of the Republic, with the postboxes green rather than red, and the Gardaí driving through it in their customary way, half easygoing, half watchful, and the atmosphere casual, almost lazy. It is as though the city leaves itself easily open to be re-imagined.

In Derry, if you are facing north, you walk knowing that there are miles of normal hinterland – ordinary fields, roads, some

villages – to the east, say, or to the south, but there is a sense of deadness to the west, an invisible brick wall between the city and Donegal. The line between the two places can seem as complete as the line between the land and the sea. If that were the case with Limerick or Liverpool, Waterford or Newcastle, it would give those cities a strange and edgy interest, it would offer streets full of shops, or the most ordinary supermarket car park, a special intensity. Everything re-created, both heightened and lowered, by politics, by a settlement made years before in a room with closed doors. Suddenly, in the light of this, Derry has a peculiar elusive quality, like a stage set, something specially created. Nothing can be taken for granted.

In the late 1980s, you could find, once work had ended, whole streets of the city deserted, not a single person appearing and not a sound. Not even a car. An eerie emptiness. You wondered if you were wise to be here, if you should not be indoors. And then it could break. Someone would appear, or there would be a shout or a few cars. You often wondered if you were looking for too much, if you were on your guard and thus reading tension into what was normality. It did not seem like normality.

I remember walking out of Derry towards the border on a sunny afternoon in the early summer of 1986 and slowly noticing the sense of urban decay. Nothing could thrive here. Any factory that was once here was a shell of a building now; shops were boarded up, houses abandoned. And that sense of watchfulness, imagined as much as real, and perhaps all the more powerfully present because it was hard to be sure about. If there had been a sudden sound, or a car appearing from one of the side roads, it would have been enough to stop you for a moment. Not a cause for alarm exactly; more a reason to be wary, to watch out, to be careful.

The difference between Lifford and Strabane was the difference between inertia and a strange sort of energy. Lifford seemed to have slowly emptied out, but the time span for this was long.

The decline was easy to see, but hard to chart. Lifford was a place where not much moved. Strabane, on the other hand, had new roads cut through it, new systems of signposting, even some

new buildings. Urban planners as much as bombers had been here. The effort to create a veneer of newness served its purpose in the same way as a shiny and noisy life-support machine can serve its purpose – it can distract from death. The energy in Strabane came from the effort to suggest energy. Once you noticed this, then the town’s lassitude was almost complete, more exact and haunting than even Lifford’s.

What is strange, of course, and easy to forget is beauty. As I moved along the border between Fermanagh and Leitrim and Monaghan, I wondered if I was misreading the landscape, if I was not looking for too much local anecdote and stories from history and irony and political copy. It might have made more sense to study the still, spare beauty of the light on a grey, cloudy morning, with the sun slanting rays of watery yellow over points in the distance. Or the extraordinary greenness of the ditches, an unkempt green especially in the Republic.

The verges and ditches tended to be more looked after, tamed, in the North. I realise that this had some sort of political significance, but there were times when the difference of colour and texture in the ditches and verges in the North and the South was worthy of study for itself alone.

If you needed politics, you could look at the difference in texture between the road surfaces. Some of this, especially when I walked north from Clones in County Monaghan, made the border almost comic. One second north and one second south. From Republic to Kingdom. Take a few steps and the Queen is Head of State, and then a few steps further, the President represents the Nation. Someone had forgotten to draw the line of the border straight, or make the road straight.

This is a landscape of intimacies as much it is as place of endings. There are only a few motorways. There are narrow roads, some smallholdings and a feeling that people know each other and notice everything. What is strange is the level of variation.

In the borderland between Derry and Donegal and Fermanagh and Monaghan especially, there is very good land beside bogland, large well-kept farms with well-proportioned houses close to cottages and lonely bungalows. A sense of pervading ripeness

versus things rotting. Nothing is easy to read in this world. Except this. On certain summer evenings when there has been rain, the clouds can move towards the horizon and the slanting sun can come out in the hour or two before darkness begins to fall. The light lifts the watery colours out of themselves into something exquisite and worthy of our full attention. These are the hours in which nothing else might seem to matter, when what has been hidden by the border, or covered by the imaginary line, comes into the open and makes itself almost clear.

17

JEAN FISHER

S E E I N G B E Y O N D T H E PA L E ¹ The Photographic Works of Willie Doherty

In a recent discussion of his photographic work, Willie Doherty remarked that his aim was ‘to try and reflect the way the terrain creates an understanding of the place’.2 The ‘place’ named in much of the work in this introduction is Derry, the artist’s home town. But we soon see that his evocations of the city and its environs do not quite subscribe to the pictorialism of orthodox urban landscape photography or to the familiar spectacle of documentary reportage. In Doherty’s work, representation is a question of positioning: the camera in relation to the object, the text in relation to image, the viewer in relation to the physicality of the photographic installation.3 ‘Place’ is not simply a named topographical entity. It is a position from which I see and am seen: a relation that is both specular and spatial, and which produces an image of myself through the ‘other’ of my gaze. The terrain that Doherty maps is a labyrinth of complex relations with this ‘other’, through whose narratives of the social and the political, the psychical and the historical, the human subject constructs its sense of identity.

The Walls, 1987 (p. 48), is a black and white photograph presenting a panoramic view of the Bogside from immediately inside the city walls. The composition is severely symmetrical: a pale cloudy sky; mid-grey tones of the rising slope of terraces that form the picture’s horizon; the dark band of the wall pressed close to the picture plane. There is something faintly oppressive about the way the buildings are squeezed between sky and wall – perhaps because the position occupied by the camera takes in neither a background nor the downward slope that would connect the wall to the terraces in the middle distance.

The focused clarity of the latter gives it an intimate proximity to the viewer which is belied by the scale of the houses, rendering distance ambiguous. The absence of ‘transitional’ spaces reflects the unnegotiable nature of the inscriptions overlaying buildings and wall: always / without in green lettering on the former (a colour emblematic of Nationalism), within / f orever in blue lettering on the latter (a colour emblematic of Unionism).

Whilst the picture’s emphatic horizontality forces the eye into a lateral scanning movement, the camera’s position – which is

reproduced by that of the photographic work on the wall – gives us a commanding view of the terrain. We are caught in the act of surveillance.

As we imagine that, with powerful lenses, we could penetrate the interiors of the facing windows, so we also become aware that those ‘eyes’ may see us. Indeed, were it not for the presence of this ‘gaze of the “other” ’, we should not be able to assume the sovereignty of power that this position affords us. The ‘seeing / being seen’ dyad is a question of both position and disposition: I see you in the place I am not. However, what The Walls brings into relief, is that this narcissistic relation between oneself and ones ‘other’ beyond the given boundary, is inscribed with a profound uneasiness.

Our gaze in The Walls is ‘illegal’, unauthorised, insofar as it sees from the political place in reality we / Doherty are not. We are invited to mimic or usurp the position occupied symbolically by Unionism, and literally by the surveillance machine of the British security forces, in its relation to the Catholic community. Derry, with its video-masts overseeing the Bogside, its checkpoints and house searches, is a place in which, at least for the Nationalist ‘other’, there is no private domain that is not penetrated by public forces of control. This disciplinary mechanism governing Derry’s spatiosocial relations bears an uncanny resemblance to Michel Foucault’s description of a panoptical formation of state power.4 The panopticon is a spatial model of surveillance dependent (like the photograph, one of its primary instruments) on light and visibility, and whose efficiency and effectiveness is based on the fact that one only need put in place the apparatus of surveillance for the individual to assume that he is potentially under constant observation. For the observed at least, as Foucault comments, ‘visibility is a trap’.

In the philosopher’s reflections, the prototypical structure instrumental in the formation of panopticism was found in a military archive outlining the strategies to be implemented in the event of an urban plague. ‘Underlying disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder.’ 5 It is the concept of disorder that interests us here

since it is its imminence in Derry that prevents a disciplinary mechanism from remaining covert. However, the disorder implied is not ‘terrorism’ which is, at best, only a symptom.

More to the point is that for a hegemonic apparatus ‘disorder’ is a disturbing heterogeneity within its notion of a healthy homogeneous social body – it is what cannot be legitimated or, in representational terms, what cannot be made over into a recognisable and repeatable sign. For British colonial power, heterogeneity and the ‘contagion’ it threatens, has historically been those components of indigenous Irish culture that could not be assimilated to British belief structures.

The significance of Doherty’s ‘usurpation’ must therefore be understood in the context of a city that still bears the imprint of a colonial structure of power which represents the Irish Nationalist as ‘other’ at the same time as it actively prohibits it access to the means of representing itself – in effect, of the freedom to construct its own identity as an equal speaking subject.6 As Doherty indicates in The Walls, cultural difference is marked by two (absent) locations: the space between the site of power (inside the walls) and the place of the ‘other’ (the Bogside), and the space beyond the horizon of the visible or recognisable: unnegotiable or untranslatable zones that resist the signifying demand of colonial power. In topographical terms the ‘beyond’ might be described as the ‘hinterland’ of the colonial centre. What is truly ‘beyond the Pale’ is that which is outside the jurisdiction of the law – and for the privileged gaze of Northern Ireland the physical reality of this is a profound heterogeneity not only within its borders, but a matter of a few miles beyond Derry’s westerly and northern boundaries.

Any assumption that this privileged gaze is in control of what it sees is undermined in two installations, Undercover / Unseen, 1985 (pp. 32–33) and Fog: Ice / Last Hours of Daylight, 1985 (pp. 34–35), each comprising a pair of large-scale photographs positioned on the wall such that the viewer can imagine her / himself ‘in’ the view. In the former work, the left-hand panel, inscribed, undercover, presents us with an image of a footpath through tangled undergrowth located by the river; the right-hand panel,

unseen, is a view of a bend in a seemingly featureless road leading to the border. If, at first glance, these images seem innocuous, banal even, they soon take on menacing overtones (informed, in part, no doubt, by the expectations that media representations of Northern Ireland have instilled in us). In neither case is it possible to see what is ahead; nor is it possible to penetrate the dense thicket of the one or the blind corner of the other. The legends, by the river and to the border, give the images a dual reading depending on the position from which one is speaking. Thus on the one hand they hold the promise of a passage to freedom, and on the other, precipitate a paralysing uncertainty regarding what may lie ahead. For the privileged gaze invisibility is a trap; seeing here conjures up a paranoid sense of blindness and vulnerability, of being seen without seeing.

In Fog: Ice / Last Hours of Daylight, this blindness is conveyed through atmospheric conditions. The compositions are similar in the two photographs. In the cold wintry scene of Fog: Ice we are positioned on a frost-glazed slope overlooking the city which, as the text tells us with a disarming ingenuousness, is obscured by a shrouding and pervading mist. We follow the trace of footsteps down towards the buildings only to lose it in the blanketing whiteness. In Last Hours of Daylight, we are closer to the city, overlooking a terrace of houses, but here, the view beyond is veiled by a pall of coal-fire smoke. The text, stifling and surveillance, evokes a sense of entrapment that, like Undercover / Unseen, has a dual component. The veil that encloses the city’s population in a claustrophobic silence, is also the veil that frustrates our desire to see.

This play on illegibility takes on more specific nuances in Doherty’s single black and white ‘landscape’ photographic work, The Blue Skies of Ulster, 1986 (p. 47), which is inscribed with the legend ‘we shall never forsake the blue skies of ulster for the grey mists of an irish republic’. The legend, a familiar Loyalist sentiment, was found by the artist graffitied on a Waterside wall. The photo work, conceived in the manner of an 18th century ‘conversation piece’ to be displayed over a mantlepiece, throws the political world into an uncomfortable

19

proximity with the domestic domain. The image is a view of the River Foyle both of whose banks, as well as the horizon itself, are all but obliterated by a heavy mist. There is no visible bridge so that the river becomes a ‘dead’ zone, or ‘no-man’s land’, between the banks. In this case, the political perspective of the viewer – whether he / she is of the west bank (predominantly Nationalist), or east bank (predominantly Unionist) – conditions the position from which one might interpret the work. If there is a humorous irony in the contradiction of the phrase ‘blue skies’ with the image of a (typical) misty grey day in Derry, it soon plunges us into the abyss of language. For here is a mythic speech that represents ‘Ulster’ as the imaginary site of clarity and order as against the Republic, and all that it signifies historically in terms of Irish identity, as precisely a hinterland of grey and incoherent ‘otherness’.

Doherty’s image of an (almost) anywhere-in-particular lacks those specific signs that would enable an identification between place and spectator. The featureless roadside, riverside, housing estate or scrubland typical of the edge of urban centres, are wastelands of undecidability marking the limit of the organised control of the city, and by implication a limit of legibility in the relationship between the ‘other’ and the imaginary unitary self. This uncertainty turns on the problem of visual

representation itself in its assumption of an equation between seeing and knowing. Doherty’s blindspots, veils and absences, the opacity of the view and its refusal to surrender its contents to the controlling gaze of the camera, reveal the inadequacy of the photograph. Here, contrary to the common belief in the photograph’s pure transparency, something eludes the eye, exceeds the focus or frame of the image.

Like Undercover / Unseen, the dual Protecting / Invading, 1987 (pp. 50–51), reveals this gaze to be disturbed. The impenetrable scrub vegetation and twisting lane depicted here camouflage the place of the ‘other’ while precipitating a paranoid anxiety in the position held by us / the camera. That this is anxiety of chaos and death is clear if the work is read literally in the context of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland; but it is also a psychosis that haunts the imaginary relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in colonialist discourse.

Faced with an incomprehensible ‘otherness’, the coloniser has the option of accommodating it either in terms of identity or difference. David Cairns and Shaun Richards point out that whereas the Norman English invaders may have responded to the indigenous Irish in terms of similarities and correspondences with their own self-image, following the Elizabethan search for English nationhood and overseas dominance, Irish identity became drawn in terms of difference.7 Englishness and non-Englishness, superiority and inferiority, civilisation and savagery, rationality and irrationality: ‘Irishness’ was to become the negative term in a series of positional oppositions trapped in the libidinal economy of the imaginary and characterised by a misrecognition of the self. For in order for the colonial self to take control, to justify dispossession and exploitation, it must make the world over into the mirror of an ideal self. This is a move that entails projecting its own ‘disorder’ onto the ‘native’ while simultaneously disavowing the latter’s ‘real’ coherence or identity. But as Abdul JanMohamed points out, ‘ … the gratification that this situation affords is impaired by the [coloniser’s] alienation from his own unconscious desire. In

Installation view, The Blue Skies of Ulster, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin, 1986

the “imaginary” text, the subject is eclipsed by his fixation on and fetishisation of the “other”: the self becomes a prisoner of the projected image. Even though the native is negated by the projection of the inverted image, his presence as an absence can never be cancelled. Thus the colonist’s desire only entraps him in the dualism of the “imaginary” and foments a violent hatred of the native’.8

What is finally discomforting about the blindspots, veils and absences in Doherty’s work is their lack of a reciprocal gaze.

These images are not mirrors by which I might secure my identity through a narcissistic recognition of and by an ‘other’. Rather, the ‘other’ is evanescent, concealed, present in its very absence.

Lacking points of identification, we are caught in the trap of a gaze that, turned back on us, freezes us in its glance.

If Irish identity is seen as unknowable in the colonial relation it is not because it possesses an essential opacity; there is no ‘Irishness’ outside the rhetoric that engenders difference. Rather it is because the colonial gaze constructs it through the mirror of disavowal and projection. However, as Doherty’s work proposes, the contested terrain of identity has more turns than a Celtic knot; and in this regard we must pay attention to the constant doubling – of the gaze, of the formal structure, of interpretation itself – that characterises his work. Doubling implies ambivalence, and the path of speculation that this draws us towards is that, contrary to the wilful demand of the ego for a fixed and ideal self, the nature of identity is essentially provisional. The Blue Skies of Ulster has already offered us two clues: firstly, that the fantasy inscribed in mythic speech ‘misrecognises’ or contradicts reality; and secondly, that the two opposing river banks are more or less indistinguishable. In other words, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, ‘there comes a point… at which ‘pure’ difference merely collapses back into ‘pure’ identity, united as they are in their utter indeterminacy.’ 9 The duplicity of identity and difference is posed in a two-part photo-installation, Stone upon Stone, 1986 (pp. 39–40). Designed for a narrow corridor-like space, the photographs face each other

such that the viewer cannot see both in full view simultaneously.

Each photograph is almost, but not quite, a mirror image of the other: near symmetrical views of the west and the east shores of the River Foyle. The former (Nationalist) is stony and barren compared to the latter (Loyalist). The photographs are inscribed with symbolic signs of Republicanism and Loyalism respectively: ‘tiocfaidh ár lá’ (our day will come), in green lettering, accompanies the west bank of the river foyle, whilst ‘this we will maintain’, in blue lettering, accompanies the east bank of the river foyle. Despite their compositional similarity, the two positions are separated, not only in terms of space (their positions on the gallery wall) and temporality (the future in one, the past in the other), but also of language itself.

At the same time, if the phrase stone upon stone alludes to the layered accumulation of cultural identity, what we are given to see in both images is its disintegration to ‘nature’ or chaos.

The Other Side, 1988 (p. 55), alludes to the paradoxes of identity through the topography of Derry. It is a panorama of the Foyle valley taken from a cultivated hillside on the east bank, and overlooking the west bank housing estates, extending as far as the hills that mark the border with the Republic’s Co. Donegal.

Both east and west territories occupy approximately equal areas although, as in The Walls, the zone that separates the two

Installation view, Stone upon Stone, Redemption Gallery, Derry, 1986

21

territories – in this case, the River Foyle – is obscured. The larger inscription, the other side, sited on the east bank, renders the positions of the viewer ambiguous; are we seeing from ‘the other side’ or are we looking at ‘the other side’? Spatial orientation is further confused by the inscriptions west is south and east is north, which refer to the paradoxical dislocation between the political and geographical boundaries of the territory.10 Derry itself is more than a geographical anomaly; having been claimed

by Northern Ireland by virtue of its symbolic value to Loyalism, this monological voice has progressively been displaced by Nationalism (although this has not substantially altered the balance of power).

Whilst the conundrum of positionality that Doherty sets up in this body of work alludes to the geopolitical inequalities of Northern Ireland, it also raises the problem of co-dependency in the relation of ‘self’ and ‘other’; as with Stone upon Stone, both sides are trapped in the same symbolic structure to their mutual detriment. Both sides are engaged in a mutual misrecognition in which the search for identity remains tied to what Edward Said has described as the ‘metaphysics of essences’ that have their origins in the hegemonic effects of colonialism: ‘ … it is the first principle of imperialism that there is a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction between ruler and ruled.

Nativism, alas, reinforces the distinction by revaluating the weaker or subservient partner. And it has often led to compelling but often demagogic assertions about a native past, history or actuality that seems to stand free not only of the coloniser but of worldly time itself… to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism too willingly, to accept the very radical, religious and political divisions imposed on places like Ireland … by imperialism itself. To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like … Irishness … is, in a word, to abandon history.’ 11

Whilst Loyalism is equally trapped in a metaphysics of essences, it is the ‘nativism’, or ‘Celtic twilight’ sentiment, haunting Irish

Nationalism that Doherty interrogates in a body of work relating to Stone upon Stone.

As in The Blue Skies of Ulster, a heavy mist pervades the scene of Home, 1987 (p. 53), in this case, of a stony hillside. The inscriptions lost perspectives, ancient stones and home appear to be a reverie on the Fenian search for an essential Irish identity in the pre-historic, pre-colonial mythic past. ‘Home’ (identity) here, however, is a barren and unyielding place wreathed in mist. The mythic Irish past offers no solace; the ‘perspective’ that is ‘lost’ is, to take up Said’s point, an historical dimension that would address a present reality.

The pathos of mythic symbolism forms the subject of the two-part Longing / Lamenting, 1988, depicting on the one hand an almost cloudless blue sky, and on the other a patch of desiccated grass littered with dead leaves.12 The work alludes to the phoenix theme of death and resurrection that has given meaning to the romantic sacrifice of Fenian nationalism from the United Irishmen to the provisional IRA,13 and which found its most enduring and eloquent expression in Patrick Pearce: ‘Life springs from death and from the graves of patriot men and women spring nations… They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland, unfree, shall never be at peace!’ 14 Believing, 1988 (p. 57), also alludes to the promise of renewal; but the hope signified by the rosy dawn is countered by the deadening unkempt elements in the picture that return us to the bleak indifference of the outskirts of Doherty’s city. This work has close affinities with the single-image Mesh, 1986 (p. 45). Like the rosy dawn of Believing, the frost-limned leaves scattered on the ground allude to an Irish poetics echoed in the accompanying legend, derived from the stained-glass window of a local church: ‘Crowded full of heaven’s angels is every leaf of the oaks of Derry’.

And yet the frozen beauty of dead leaves, far from reflecting the tree that gave Derry (Doire Cholmcille, oak grove) its name and spiritual vitality, suggests stasis, suspended life, which like the mythic speech of Ireland itself is enmeshed, entrapped, outside time and the historical process.

Believing… waiting… dreaming… longing… lamenting: there is a melancholic fatalism in Republicanism’s mourning for a lost past which disables the future itself. As Luke Gibbons has argued, ‘A revolutionary movement obsessed with symbols exists at one remove from reality…’ 15 If the Irish landscape is one of Nationalism’s primary symbols, it may be understood in terms of a common preoccupation among colonised peoples with the reclamation of lost land, in which, as Said maintains, recovery first takes place in the imagination.16 It is imagination that Doherty appears to be alluding to, not only in the use of participles like ‘believing’ and ‘longing’, but also in his recent use of colour to signify the unreality of folkloric photographic depictions of Ireland.

Dreaming, 1988 (p. 59 ) and Waiting, 1988 (p. 61 ), play ironically on the image of Ireland as a pastoral idyll nurtured both by touristic representations and Republicanism’s desire for a united nationhood. Instead of dramatic skies over green rolling hills and picturesque crofts, however, Doherty presents us with golden sunsets written over Rossville Street looking towards the ‘Free Derry’ gable wall, and clear horizons over a panorama of the city with [empty] factories in the foreground. The rolling hills that symbolise Republican aspirations – ‘waiting’, ‘dreaming’ – hover inaccessibly on the horizon. Doherty’s allusions to ‘acceptable levels of violence’ and unemployment concealed by British ‘normalisation’ policies in the North are also comments on the cynicism of this hegemonic apparatus: ‘ Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of interests and the tendencies of groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium be formed – in other words that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economo-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential.’ 17

It is their inability to ‘touch the essential’ that underlines Doherty’s critique of representations of Northern Ireland,

whether they subscribe to the conventions of romantic idealism or realism. Such conventions collude with the old imperialist drive to dehistoricise the ‘other’ in its justification of cultural superiority and exploitation, and to gloss over the social realities below the surface of appearances. That this also reinforces stereotypes of Irishness is nowhere more obvious than in the predominance of images of violence in media reportage. The prevailing representational genre here is spectacle, whose ideological implications are not far removed from what Gibbons has to say about Irish Victorian melodrama: ‘ The overpowering effects of stage scenery on dramatic action provided a useful popular support to the view that political violence and ‘agrarian outrages’ were not a product of colonial misrule, or any social conditions, but emanated instead from the character. The fact that Irish landscape was defined in terms of wilderness and disorder, and that the weather was gloomy, turbulent and subject to fitful changes, made any suggestion of a strange osmosis between climate and character all the more attractive.’ 18

Under English rule, the ‘wilderness’ and ‘disorder’ of the Irish landscape and character were to be controlled by imposing the rationality of an imported architecture. Whilst Palladian-style residences of the landed gentry dominated the Irish hinterland, it was the Georgian elegance of Dublin itself that embodied the ‘civilising’ English presence. Neglected for decades following independence as the symbol of colonial power, the fair city has now been resurrected as a touristic spectacle without, however, substantially changing the stereotypes of ‘Irishness’ that inscribe its history.

Playing on familiar picture-postcard views of Dublin doors, Doherty’s three-part vertical photo-installations Evergreen Memories, 1989 and Fading Dreams, 1989 (p. 24), focus on details of the facades and surfaces that characterise the city in the eyes of the visitor. In an image placed high above our heads, we discover an Irish harp – it is part of the stonework surrounding a clock.

23

evergreen memories, in the green lettering accompanying all these images, announces a temporal bond. But if the photograph transfixes time, so does the ivy-covered facade of Fading Dreams.

Both image and building are destined to become no more than trace memories of a fantasised past.

The harp reappears on a door overlaid with a cryptic double inscription: hospitable refers to what the doors clearly signify – fabled Irish hospitality; but depraved is a reminder of the irrationality of Irishness’ that is the unspoken underside of touristic messages. The clock, and the robust door embellished with rose mouldings of resolute psychopathic, are parts of the neo-classical facade of the General Post Office in O’Connell Street. As with so many aspects of Irish culture, this one-time monument to the colonial administration’s sense of order and permanence underwent a paradoxical shift in meaning following the Rising of 1916, to become a principle icon of a rebellious and victorious Republicanism. What is psychopathic here? Irish attachment to the ghosts of a fictionalised past perhaps; but also English hallucinations of ‘Irishness’. At our feet, a view through a stone balustrade of the River Liffey points to unknown depths beyond surface appearances; a detail of a cobbled street is marked with the legend cursed existence as if the very stones were a trap to seduce the unwary visitor by his own romantic fantasies. In Doherty’s Dublin, it is the undead – the wraiths of metaphysical essences – that stalk its streets.

In some respects, the more negative ‘primitivist’ connotations of the ‘wilderness’ – that the view cannot render up to vision a tangible or holistic meaning – have shifted from ‘nature’ to the decayed or anonymous ‘alien’ urban ghetto. But, in any case, such a perception is one constructed by the ‘misrecognition’ of the outsider. Doherty is fully aware of these potential misrepresentations, not only with respect to others’ images of his home, but also his own images of elsewhere. It is an awareness that informs his more ‘objective’ photoworks from Dublin and Belfast.

By contrast to Derry, the distribution of Nationalist and Loyalist communities in Belfast is topographically more diffuse, ‘… it subordinates both individuals and their natural Fading Dreams, 1989

environment from the outset to a sense of place, to a social engagement with landscape as historically contested terrain’.19 As with the Derry work, these photo-installations reveal how the panoptical strategies of regulation and disempowerment subtly inscribe the fabric of the city. In Fixed Parameter, 1989, a singleimage work, we are positioned on a derelict industrial riverside site from which, in the distance, we can just see the business centre of the city. A similar relationship is defined in the twopart Commitment / Investment, 1989 (p. 25). In Investment, we are excluded from the commercial centre by a continuous wall, whilst in Commitment, we are situated in the site of a disused gasworks that has been planted with a few spindly trees. If, like Dreaming or Waiting, this speaks of the cynicism of ‘normalisation’ policies that aim to attract business investment, like Sever / Isolate, 1989, it reveals that these policies are coincidental with others which deliberately exacerbate the deep conflicts in Belfast society. Sever is a shot of the Westlink highway which, in effect, separates the Catholic Lower Falls area from the city centre. The only solely pedestrian access is the footbridge depicted in Isolate.

The effect of limiting organic movement among peoples, or of isolating them from the functions of modern urban life, produces a vicious circle – or circle of viciousness – whose sense

of futility is reflected in the brutalising architecture described in these works. Closed Circuit, 1989 (p. 26), shows the Sinn Féin Advice Centre in Short Strand. Not only is the corner of the street lined with high corrugated metal barriers, but the building itself is barricaded and fitted with a video-camera – a modest replica not only of the security forces’ own methods of self-protection, but also of their ‘siege’ mentality. The aim in Closed Circuit, as is apparent in all Doherty’s work, is neither to sentimentalise nor to idealise, but to enable us to engage with a critical reading of the complex rhetorical positions that constitute a sense of selfhood in this region. This is not to say, however, that Closed Circuit, as its title suggests, does not also reflect upon the pathos of an Irish Nationalism forced to internalise and reproduce the same signs of paranoid militarism as its antagonistic other, to collapse its own difference into the expression of sameness.

The problem with nationalism is that it is a symbol which, like ‘landscape’, is trapped in an imaginary realm, proposing the existence of a unitary subject conterminous with an autonomous collective identity. This concept of selfhood is limiting: ‘Any emancipatory politics must begin with the specific… but must in the same gesture leave it behind. For the freedom in question is not the freedom to “be Irish”… but simply the freedom now

Commitment / Investment, 1989

25

enjoyed by certain other groups to determine their identity as they may wish.’ 20 Clearly, it is possible to read Doherty’s Belfast work in fairly literal terms as the failure of Northern Ireland’s Anglo-Irish relations. But on another, more subtle level, these images of barriers of various kinds imply the inaccessibility of difference to the eyes of the visitor or stranger; the sense of estrangement induced when the ‘other’ remains opaque. If the intense scrutiny of Northern Ireland by dominant culture persistently fails to provide any enlightened solutions it is due in part to the fact that this imperial gaze is blinded by its own assumptions and prejudices. As one of the Bogside murals states, ‘Many have eyes but cannot see’.

Over and above its specific references, the power of Doherty’s work is its fundamental concern with the languages of representation as they work to construct identity. As the work under discussion here makes plain, for the suppressed Irish Nationalist community of Northern Ireland this is a complex matter, involving profound contradictions. Doherty’s attentiveness to language is characteristic of the post -colonial subject severed from its mother tongue and where cultural difference in the language of dominance is represented as an inferior version of the same.21

It is, as Sivaramakrishnan pointedly states, a matter of survival for the ‘other’ to know the language of dominant culture, while the latter remains ignorant of his / her. 22 It is the consequences of this ignorance or blindness that gives rise to the misrecognition of the Irish ‘other’; and it is to Doherty’s challenge to those representations by outsiders that perpetuate this misrecognition that I should like to address the closing commentary on his work.

On a formal level, Doherty’s work takes on board diverse photographic conventions, among them, the British landscape photo-text codes of art practice during the 1970s. Their tendency to seek out seemingly uninhabited ‘wilderness’, as if marking what Gibbons calls ‘the blissful moment of creation’, 23 has since been perceived as retreading the path of colonialism.24 The implicit nostalgia in this work for a mythic pre-modern past in which a unified transcendental self is neither threatened by cultural difference nor contaminated by the effects of modern industrialisation, is at a considerable remove from Doherty’s resistance to globalising abstractions. When he speaks of unfamiliar terrain it is not to present resolutions to its contradictions but to deliberate on the imperfect knowledge that vision offers us. Doherty’s landscape is never a blank page, a ‘virgin’ territory; it is always and already a cultural text, inscribed with the social, the political and the historical. There is no ‘real’ space anterior to, or outside, the processes of signification.

In this respect, Doherty’s work is in marked contrast to the liberal humanist tradition of photography.25 This tradition seldom fails to transcend what Roland Barthes calls ‘the effect of the real’; or what Edward Said described in relation to broadcast news as ‘no background, but only a moving foreground’: ‘ They give you simply: we were there yesterday, we’ll go back tomorrow, so you don’t have to worry about what happens between then and now because we’ll be giving it to you in a thirty-second slot tomorrow, should the crisis continue.’ 26

The problem with this genre is that it frames the object in both senses of the word. It gives priority to the symbolic function Closed Circuit, 1989

of the sign privileging resemblance: an analogical relation between signifier and signified. In reference to the symbol, Barthes states that ‘its form [is] constantly exceeded by the power and movement of its content. The symbol is much less a (codified) form of communication than an (affective) instrument of participation.’ 27 As we have seen, Doherty’s work does not privilege the symbol; content is thoroughly bound with the formal structure of the work: both its site of transmission and its site of reception. We are consequently encouraged to engage not with affective content (sentimentalism is absent), but with the process of seeing and its instrumental role in the fabrication of identity. Above all, what Doherty’s work makes clear is that representation is a construction that mediates the self’s sense of itself. The inscriptions of The Walls, always / without and within / forever, may conceivably describe the ambivalent relationship between the camera and its object, between the viewing subject and the object of his / h er vision, between the ‘self’ and its ‘other’: a seeming intimacy yet marked by an unbreachable distance.

In attending to its deep structures rather than its surface signs and effects, Doherty radically politicises the urban landscape; he reclaims it from the priority of vision, which tends to construct a transcendental or idealist self, and returns it to its place within the circuit of language. We might suggest further that Doherty’s work politicises vision, enabling us to reflect upon the implications of what Liz Curtis dramatises as a narrative of misinformation in the reportage of Northern Ireland politics.28 Official denials of the colonial accountability of the conflict, the criminalisation of dissent, the outlawing of Sinn Féin’s political voice and the right to silence, are strategies that violate the right of a constituency or individual to represent itself, and that render difference undebatable. As a consequence, the complex voice of Irish Nationalism is trapped in a closed debate while it continues to be represented from the outside through the old colonial myths of Irish savagery and irrationality: as a fetishised, depoliticised and dehistoricised ‘other’. As Doherty’s work is at pains to point out, ‘Irish Nationalism’ is a sign now

so overdetermined by all sides in the conflict that it has become emptied of any productive value. But if ‘place’ remains a historically and politically contested territory, so also are the identities of all who dwell in it. For Doherty, identity is a question of constructed positions and need not be trapped within stereotypical closures. Perhaps his own ‘position’ may be likened to that of Frantz Fanon who, with equal passion, refused to be a slave of the past: ‘In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.’ 29

27

NOTES

1. This text was first published in Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths, Cardiff: Ffotogallery, in association with the Orchard Gallery, Derry and Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1990, unpaginated.

‘The Pale’ was a fortified boundary around Dublin, constructed by the first English settlers to mark their jurisdiction from that of the ‘wild’ native Irish. The term ‘beyond the Pale’ has come to refer to transgressive behaviour.

2. Willie Doherty in an interview with Christopher Coppock, ‘Colouring the Black and White’, Circa Art Magazine, No. 40, 1988, p. 26.

3. In contradistinction to the convention of hanging photographs on the wall according to an ‘ideal’ viewing point, Doherty installs his work accordingly to the viewing position from which each shot was taken.

In this way, the viewer is invited to share the artist’s orientation in relation to the view, and to be aware that this position is neither ‘neutral’ nor ‘ideal’.

4. Foucault’s description of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon might apply to Derry: The enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.

See Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (trans. by Alan Sheridan), New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 137.

5. Ibid. p. 199.

6. Policies to prevent Irish Nationalism from representing itself range from the active discouragement of photography in Derry by the British security forces to the government’s prohibition of Sinn Féin’s voice on broadcast media.

7. Cairns, David and Richards, Shaun, Writing Ireland. Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 2.

8. JanMohamed, Abdul R., ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 78.

9. Eagleton, Terry, ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’, Field Day Pamphlet, No. 13, 1988, p. 15.

10. The cardinal points west and north are part of the Republican South despite the conventional use of ‘The North’ to mean ‘Ulster’, which in turn is a misnomer referring to only six of the original nine counties.

11. Said, E. W., ‘Yeats and Decolonisation’, Field Day Pamphlet, No. 15, 1988, p. 14.

12. The photographs were shot in Creggan Cemetery.

13. Kearney, Richard, ‘Myth and Terror’, Crane Bag, Vol. 2, No. 182, 1978, p. 125.

14. Patrick Pearse’s speech at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, quoted in Jackson, T. A., Ireland Her Own, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, p.404.

15. Gibbons, Luke, ‘The Politics of Silence’, Framework, No. 30 / 31, p. 2.

16. Said, E. W., ‘Yeats and Decolonisation’, op. cit., p. 10.

17. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Prison Notebooks, (trans. Hoare and Nowell Smith), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, p. 161.

18. Gibbons, L., ‘Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema’, in Rockett, Kevin, Gibbons, Luke and Hill, John (ed.), Cinema and Ireland, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 211.

19. Ibid., p. 235.

20. Eagleton, T., ‘Nationalism: Irony and Commitment’, op. cit., p. 10.

21. Fisher, Jean, ‘Other Cartographies’, Third Text, No. 6, 1989.

22. Sivaramakrishnan, Arvind, ‘The Slave with Two Hearts’, Third Text, No. 7, Autumn, 1989.

23. Gibbons, L., ‘Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema’, op. cit., p. 207.

24. Araeen, Rasheed, quoted in Artscribe International, No. 74, March / April, 1989, p. 74.

25. One of the principal genres of this tradition is social documentary. Its tendency is to select and frame an object that would stand for the ‘human condition’ it seeks to reveal – rural or urban poverty, the horrors of war, racism, etc. – but the result often merely aestheticises the problem. It is a form of anthropological panopticism which assumes an objectivity on the part of the photographer. Its historical roots may be traced to the early use of photography in medical pathology, criminology and ethnology.

26. Said, E. W., ‘In the Shadow of the West’, with Crary, Jonathan and Mariani, Phil, in Wedge, No. 7 / 8, Winter / Spring, 1985.

27. Barthes, Roland, ‘The Imagination of the Sign’, in Barthes: Selected Writings, London: Fontana Press, 1989, p. 213.

28. Curtis, Liz, Ireland and the Propaganda War, London: Pluto Press, 1984.

It should be pointed out that Curtis’s text is an example of investigative journalism. Whilst it gives an account of the media’s complicity with state propaganda on Northern Ireland, it is not a critique of the structure of journalistic representations.

29. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986, p. 229.

29

Derry and the Donegal Border 1985 – 2013

31

Undercover / Unseen 1985

33

Fog: Ice / Last Hours of Daylight 1985

35

The Sleep of Reason 1986

37

Stone upon Stone 1986

39

41

Past to Present 1986

43

Mesh 1986

45

The Blue Skies of Ulster 1986

47

The Walls 1987

49

Protecting / Invading 1987

51

Home 1987

53

The Other Side 1988

55

Believing 1988

57

Dreaming 1988

59

Waiting 1988

61

Fractured / Encased 1989

63

False Dawn 1990

65

God Has Not Failed Us 1990

67

Shifting Ground 1991

69

At the Verge 1992

71

Remote Control 1992

73

Last Bastion 1992

75

Enduring 1992

77

The Bridge 1992

79

81

Alleyway 1992

83

Wasteground 1992

85

Unapproved Road 1992

87

Ulster Will Fight / Ireland Unfree Shall Never be at Peace 1992

89

Incident 1993

91

Incident II (Hijack) 1993

93

Face to Face The Irish are Insane 1993

95

The Irish are Evil

97

The Irish are Pitiful

99

Shadow of the Walls 1993

101

Border Road 1994

103

Suburban Incident 1994

105

Border Incident 1994

107

Blocked Road 1994

109

The Outskirts 1994

111

Border Road II 1994

113

Abandoned Vehicle 1994

115

Abandoned Vehicle II 1994

117

Border Crossing 1994

119

Minor Incident I 1994

Minor Incident II 1994

121

Unreported Incident 1995

123

Tyre Fragment 1995

Bullet Holes 1995

125

Unapproved Road II 1995

127

At the Border I (Walking Towards a Military Checkpoint) 1995

129

At the Border II (Low Visibility) 1995

131

At the Border III (Trying to Forget the Past) 1995

133

At the Border IV (The Invisible Line) 1995

135

At the Border V (Isolated Incident) 1995

137

At the Border VI (Checkpoint) 1995

139

Control Zone 1995

141

Suspicious Vehicle 1995

143

Tunnel 1995

145

Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over I 1995

Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over II 1995

147

Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over III 1996

149

The Fence 1996

151

Discarded Number Plate 1996

Windscreen Fragment 1996

153

Minor Incident III 1996

Minor Incident IV 1996

155

Border Crossing 1997

157

Unreported Incident II 1997

159

Last Occupant 1997

161

Abandoned Interior I 1997

163

Abandoned Interior II 1997

165

Abandoned Interior III 1997

167

Small Acts of Deception I 1997

169

Small Acts of Deception II 1997

171

Small Acts of Deception III 1997

173

Out of the Shadows I 1997

175

Out of the Shadows II 1997

177

Out of Sight 1997

179

Looking Back 1997

181

The Road Ahead 1997

183

Critical Distance 1997

185

Searching 1997

187

Crash Scene 1997

189

Disused Border Crossing 1997

191

No Visible Signs 1997

193

The Side of the Road 1999

195

Retraces I 2002

197

Retraces II 2002

Retraces III 2002

199

Retraces IV 2002

Retraces V 2002

201

Retraces VI 2002

203

Wire Fence and Blue Sky 2004

205

Underpass at Dusk 2004

207

Grey Day I 2007

209

Grey Day II 2007

Grey Day III 2007

211

Grey Day IV 2007

Grey Day V 2007

213

Grey Day VI 2007

Grey Day VII 2007

215

Grey Day VIII 2007

Grey Day IX 2007

217

Grey Day X 2007

Grey Day XI 2007

219

Flyover Ghost Walk 1985 / 2012

221

Wasteland Endless 1985 / 2012

223

Silence After a Kneecapping 1985 / 2012

225

To the Border A Fork in the Road

The place where Ciaran Doherty was executed in February 2010; accused of being a British informer he was abducted two hours before his body was dumped at the side of the road.

1986 / 2012 227

Between Failed Housing Project 1987 / 2012

229

Enclave Dividing Wall 1987 / 2012

231

Back The Walls

1991 / 2013 233

Hoarfrost Unapproved Border Crossing 1991 / 2012

235

Face Down Alleyway Used for Cover on January 30th, 1972 1992 / 2012

237

Against the Wall Alleyway Used for Cover on January 30th, 1972 1992 / 2013

239

Headlights Border Road at Dusk 1993 / 2012

241

Remains (Estate) 2013

243

Remains (Along the Wall) 2013

245

Remains (Kneecapping at Gartan Square) 2013

247

Remains (Kneecapping Behind Creggan Shops) 2013

249

JEAN FISHER

REFLECTIONS

‘ To reflect upon the ethics of memory is, at first sight, a puzzling task. This is so because memory is not in the first instance an action, but a kind of knowledge like perception, imagination and understanding. Memory constitutes a knowledge of past events, or of the pastness of past events.’

— Paul Ricoeur 1

Spanning almost thirty years, Willie Doherty’s photographic works and video installations parallel the trajectory of Derry’s recent history, albeit through a rather more oblique and critical lens than that used in conventional reportage. A retrospective of this exceptional body of work invites reflections on its role as an eyewitness testimony or aide-mémoire to a lived reality that has been obscured by political hubris and disinformation.

If Doherty’s earlier work may be said to have challenged the assumptions by which social identities are constructed, the artist’s more recent work has sought to engage with the ambivalence of memory as it sustains an uneasy truce between competing socio-historical narratives. As the recurrence of sporadic acts of violence indicate, and to paraphrase James Joyce, for some, the past is consumed in the present, but the present has not yet brought forth the hoped-for future.2 But there is a more subtle dimension to Doherty’s imaginative use of the camera: as a perceptual tool, disclosing the forces that shape ordinary lives and their struggle for collective and subjective agency under conditions of social, political and economic stress. In this sense, Doherty’s work becomes less of a ‘record’ of the trajectory of Derry’s socio-political history, and more a soliloquy on the efficacy of art as an interventionist and ethical practice in which what is knowable of an image, event or place, is never given but must be opened up to scrutiny. Doherty’s approach is to position us inside the play of differences that Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith discusses as ‘dual articulation’ in his insightful essay: 3 a productive tension between image and image or image and text, between what is and is not present in the visual field, between one temporality and another, between one state of

mind and another, and ultimately what these dualities disclose of the ascriptions of self and other.

To speak of Doherty’s work as an ethical practice is to point firstly to the extent to which it has confronted the photographic image itself as a less-than-transparent index of its subject, vulnerable to the abuses of deliberate or unconscious manipulation.

It is worth reflecting briefly on how this practice is applied to film-based photography, and why the notion of ‘Unseen’ has such a powerful resonance throughout Doherty’s work.

By the late 1970s, photography and video had both become established as legitimate artists’ media, and this development coincided with the expansion of semiotic and cultural interrogations into the entire photographic apparatus.4 Contrary to claims of its documentary ‘truth’, it was argued that the photograph was subject to aesthetic and ideological manipulation at every stage, from production to presentation: ‘in camera’ (limited angle of vision, selective framing and focus), during printing (cropping and masking), and in the display context by which the viewer was captured in the frame. Thus, the seen / scene was inescapably linked to what was absent from it – the ‘unseen’ outside the frame, out of focus. Hence, as a ‘record’ of what is already absent, we can draw analogies between the photograph and the eyewitness (whose vision can only ever be partial), and history as an imperfect reconstruction of the past from its traces; both of which become central preoccupations in Doherty’s work. Moreover, despite its seeming indexicality, the photograph remained surprisingly enigmatic, its horizon of meaning always in retreat from one’s desire to grasp it as an (impossible) ‘real’ – an issue so effectively captured in Doherty’s images where the horizon is absent or inaccessible to the gaze. The photograph was necessarily bound to a text – a caption or commentary – that ‘directed’ (or ‘misdirected’) its reading.

Doherty’s early use of textual overlays undermined this instrumentalisation of the photograph in several ways. The overlays in effect act as a partial screen that inhibits and hence frustrates the viewer’s desire for unmediated access to the image, which clearly has further implications in the context of what is knowable about

Derry. Furthermore, although Doherty’s inscriptions may be compared to the strategy of predecessors like Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, his image-text relation rejected their romanticised view of the Irish landscape, setting in motion not only a more complex visual tension but also multiple associations: words and phrases that seem at first to be simply descriptive are found to be sourced from public statements and clichés alluding to a political ‘back story’. For instance, the photographs, Believing, Dreaming and Waiting of 1988 and False Dawn from 1990 (pp. 57–61, 64) are visually encoded to connote ‘promise’ or ‘future’, and yet the texts belie such readings. These works followed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement in which hope for political resolution became compromised by a frustrating cycle of ‘talks about talks’ that broke only with the ceasefires of 1994. Similarly, three panoramic views of city lights, Looking Back, The Road Ahead and Critical Distance, all 1997 (pp. 181–185), were produced during the negotiations over what in 1998 would become the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, when again a mixture of hope and despair prevailed. Rather more uncertain allusions are attached to the later ‘Grey Days’ series of gelatin prints, 2007 (pp. 209–219). Made during the same year as the official end of the Troubles, these grey zones are infused with the eerie stillness of suspended time. Like the muted colours of Remains (Kneecapping at Gartan Square) and Remains (Kneecapping Behind Creggan Shops), both 2013 (pp. 247–248), they are tonally similar to earlier black and white images of the city’s more economically deprived neighbourhoods. Seen alongside Doherty’s series of photographs originally shot in the 1980s or early 90s, but printed in 2012, the viewer may suspect that behind the political rhetoric of urban regeneration, promises of a brighter future post-Troubles have yet to materialise.

Doherty has frequently stated that his work begins with the location, thereby responding to the perceptual field before engaging with a conceptual apparatus. Doherty’s choice of location has assiduously avoided dramatising Derry: preferring to depict the interstices of the city – unpopulated streets, blank façades, dimly lit underpasses, alleys and semi-rural waysides – unremarkable and hence resistant to appropriation by the eye that looks only

to capture iconic or ‘significant’ moments. Although far from arbitrary, they are zones of ‘in-distinction’. If obscured or oblique vision is the figure that most characterises his photographic images, circularity (the loop) dominates his time-based work – the one alluding to a world characterised by a lack of political vision, or will – the other to a world enmeshed historically in a cycle of repetition. Whilst Alleyway, Wasteground, Unapproved Road, all 1992, and Hoarfrost: Unapproved Border Crossing, 1991 / 2012 (pp. 83–87, 235), marked a shift away from the textual screens, the inability to see ahead remains. However, the textual overlays are soon to be replaced by spoken voiceovers as Doherty expands his practice to include tape / slide and video installations. Amongst the first of these are They’re all the Same, 1991, and The Only Good One is a Dead One, 1993 (p. 253), where the narrator alternates between stereotypical identities that inscribe antagonistic positions, at the same time invoking the extent to which ‘unapproved’ positions are politically silenced.5 Hoarfrost gives pause for thought because this seemingly innocuous word recurs in the artist’s voiceover script to the video installation Ghost Story, 2007 (p. 11), a reflection on the act of remembering the trauma of Bloody Sunday in 1972: ‘The next day I walked over the waste ground that was now marked by deep

False Dawn, 48-sheet billboard, Dublin, 1990

251

tyre tracks and footprints, fixed in low relief and highlighted by a sharp hoar frost.’ 6 Doherty’s repeated reference to ‘hoarfrost’ resonates as the authentic voice of the eyewitness registering the sometimes incidental but perceptual details of a scene.

Indeed, it is the unpredictability of how and what an eyewitness remembers of an event (and how this may be silenced by ‘official accounts’) that is the subject of the tape / s lide installation 30th January 1972, 1993 (p. 253).

Increasingly, it is the incidental perceptual detail that dominates Doherty’s later work, beginning with a number of photographs from 1993 thematically entitled ‘Incident’ (pp. 90–92, 104, 107, 120–123, 154–155, 159). Tyre treads etched in the road, plastic detritus and bits of discarded clothing, abandoned cars or interiors, close-ups of shell casings or circuit boards nestled in undergrowth, stains that resemble spilt blood. Ordinarily such details may seem inconsequential, but in Northern Ireland they become charged with a terrible significance. In Doherty’s work they offer the viewer a narrative potential: traces of an event, drawing on codes that we recognise from forensic crime television series, and whose status the artist interrogates further in time-based formats as ‘evidential truth’ of the past. But in this approach, too, we are confronted with uncertainty – a blurring

of the boundaries between the signs of true crime and fiction that is highlighted in the set of diptychs entitled Small Acts of Deception, 1997 (pp. 168–173) – where the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘staged’, or even between ‘informant’ and ‘witness’, is indeterminable.

That the truth of subjective testimony cannot be guaranteed, accounts for the increased dependence by inquiries on the supporting evidence of ‘objective’ material ‘clues’. But if eyewitness testimony can bear false witness, a charge successfully proven against the organs of the state by the Saville inquiry,7 forensics can be misled by the time-honoured practice of planted ‘evidence’. Perhaps, however, feelings and sensations take priority in traumatic memory, such that, as the text of Ghost Story speculates, the past is experienced as exuding from the location itself – daytime ‘wraiths’ that enjoin Joyce’s nightmare of history.

In any case, ‘hoarfrost’ recalls Michel de Certeau’s assertion that (involuntary) memory always comes ‘from the outside’, as something forgotten but recalled by a word, an image, a smell, a sound: ‘Memory is played by circumstances, just as a piano is played by a musician and music emerges from it when its keys are touched by the hands. Memory is a sense of the other.’ 8 ‘ History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’

James Joyce 9

My initial visit to Derry was in late 1989, to witness ‘at first hand’ the context of Willie Doherty’s early photographs, in order to write the catalogue essay for Unknown Depths.10 At that time, the territory was in its second decade of military occupation; and Doherty’s work, infused with allusions to boundaries (as hallucinatory as they were concrete), political hubris, surveillance and suspicion, reflected the city as ‘unhomely’. My recent return visit was to a city that had been ‘de-militarised’ and given a cosmetic makeover, although territorial markers – flags, murals and boundary walls – remained in evidence.

Installation view, Small Acts of Deception I, Alexander and Bonin, New York, 1997

Most striking was that Derry had become a city of memorials, but these were of two kinds: the prominently displayed public monument and the simple neighbourhood plaque or shrine.

What characterises the former is their surprisingly conventional formality: the Republican memorial in the Creggan, and the Hunger Strike and Bloody Sunday memorials in Rossville Street, are all variations of the ‘obelisk’, the traditional state-sanctioned form of the inscribed war memorial (and the Free Derry Wall, now a free-standing gable end, itself risks morphing into an obelisk).

These are more than understandable if, as Michael Rowlands suggests, ‘triumphalism, the reason why most memorials are monuments, achieves [a way out of melancholia] through the assertion of collective omnipotence and by banishing from memory those acts of humiliation when the nation failed to protect its young.’ 11 But if the intention is to ‘forget the pain’, it is precisely this impossibility that is reflected both in the little plaques and shrines that mark the crisis of personal loss and the preoccupations of Doherty’s work. As Doherty has himself written: ‘The problem with forgetting / the problem with remembering’.12 For this reason, the violence of the past cannot be erased by a willed act of reconciliation, but at best, as the conclusion of the Peace Process in 2007 indicated, by an act of amnesty:13 a social

contract by which conflicting constituencies agree to deliberately ‘forget’ their differences in the public domain – or better, as Kearney says, to forego the ‘debt accrued by memory of crimes’.14 Amnesty, however, is not amnesia.

In speaking of what he calls the ‘pathological-therapeutic’ level of memory, rooted in ‘wounds and scars’, Ricoeur notes that there are places where there is an excess of memory and others where there is an excess of forgetting, urging a balance between a duty to forget and a duty to remember, so that the egregious acts of the past are not repeated.15 According to Freud’s writing on trauma, such excesses are on the side of repetition and melancholia, which prevent reconciliation with the lost ‘object’ of the past, be it person or ideal. Classing this failure as an ‘abuse’ of memory, Ricoeur notes that ‘the diseases of memory are basically diseases of identity’, a displacement of selfhood to its external affiliations (from ‘who’ to ‘what’).16 Narratives may abuse memory through various manipulations – and amongst these he cites certain ‘heroic’ commemorations (including their rituals, festivals, myths), which ‘attempt to fix the memories in a kind of reverential relationship to the past’. The monument is a civic obligation to the community to memorialise its collective memory, but Adrian Forty suggests that such objects are the ‘enemy of

30th January 1972, 1993 (detail)

Installation view, The Only Good One is a Dead One, Matt’s Gallery, London, 1993

253

memory, they are what tie it down and lead to forgetfulness’, insofar as ‘they permit only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten’.17 If, in the monument, the past is abstracted, idealised and institutionalised, what is ‘forgotten’ is the pain, loss and resentment that accompany violent conflict, a poignant reminder of which returns in the simple plaques and shrines, which may be protection against the loss of memory – or perhaps against the loss of reasons for sustaining resentment…

One such shrine now exists on the Letterkenny Road, which Doherty presents as To the Border: A Fork in the Road, 1986 / 2012 (p. 227). Among a group of photographs titled ‘Lapse’, from his archive but newly printed, it presents an unusual temporal displacement. The image marks the site of an event that had still to happen at the time the photograph was taken; and in an uncharacteristic elaboration of the title, Doherty notes gruesome details of this death. Two related works assign historical significance after the event: Face Down: Alleyway Used for Cover on January 30th, 1972, 1992 / 2012 (p. 237); and Silence: After a Kneecapping, 1985 / 2012 (p. 225). All tell of stories and places unremarked by the grand narratives memorialised in monuments.

Installation view, At the Verge, 1992, Alexander and Bonin, New York, 2012

Ricoeur notes another form of narrative directed towards justice and the future that he calls ‘telling otherwise’, in which not only the victors but also the victims of history get to tell their stories.18 This resonates in the works cited above and is consistent with Doherty’s refusal to reduce complexity to an exclusive duality, or ‘divide’, that renders ‘unseen’ other perspectives.19 Indeed, the artist’s various allusions to the blurring of topographic boundaries may be taken as metaphors for the unstable criteria by which the ‘self’ seeks to distinguish itself from the ‘other’.

Hence, if Doherty’s work is a ‘telling otherwise’, it is in its disclosure of what is shared by, not what separates ‘self’ and ‘other’. In this respect Doherty’s images of urban neglect render indistinguishable the housing estates on both sides of the ‘divide’.

Contemplating these, the outsider wonders why the working class poor didn’t unite across sectarian lines against the political élite – but then one recalls Antonio Gramsci’s commentary on how the socially disenfranchised are coerced into identifying with the values of the middle classes against their own political interests,20 exacerbated by the divisive legacy left by British imperialism wherever in the world its tentacles have reached.

The bathos of this history is condensed in several works that contemplate the relationship of the Loyalist / Protestant Fountain Estate to the city, which Doherty identifies as an inner city ‘enclave’ (Enclave: Dividing Wall, 1987 / 2012, p. 230).21 The Siege of Derry took place in 1689, and yet a siege mentality is still tenaciously held and materialised in the ‘gated’ Bishop’s Gate entrance to the Fountain, and in the defensive walls and fences that Doherty captures in several other works, including Last Bastion, 1992 (p. 75), and Shadow of the Walls, 1993 (p. 100), (and, of course, in the Apprentice Boys commemorative parade). I first took God Has Not Failed Us, 1990 (p. 67), and At the Verge, 1992 (p. 71), to be reproaches about such sectarian intransigence, but on reflection they seem far more nuanced. God Has Not Failed Us shows the narrow lane between the palisaded city walls and the dilapidated Fountain, but it leads the eye only to the surviving tower of the old Derry Gaol flying the Union Jack. Thus the local residents seem imprisoned by an allegiance that (in an

ironic inversion of Doherty’s title) failed them and by a past that could have taken a different path to the future.22 At the Verge, shows the now demolished Fountain flats in the background, whose residual lives Doherty captured in, amongst other works, Abandoned Interiors, 1997 (pp. 163–167); but, inscribed with the word ‘mute’, the work prompts thoughts of how the marginalised of society of whatever allegiance become silenced by the rhetoric of the powerful.

The nightmare of history is a leitmotif weaving through the first (‘Telemachian’) episodes of Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, and it is couched as a quest for self realisation in the face of filial dispossession by what Gilles Deleuze in another literary context called ‘monstrous devouring fathers’: ‘if humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function’, whereby the ‘sons’ can find their own space of agency, through not predetermined concepts, but percepts of living conditions.23 For Stephen Dedalus this paralysis of the future is attributable to ‘the imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’. More than a hundred years later, we catch echoes of Joyce’s exasperation with a past that obscures a productive vision of the future in the artistic practice of Willie Doherty: despite modest concessions, the baleful effects of these ‘fathers’ still resonate in the affiliations of their heirs in Joyce’s ‘black north and true blue bible’ – heirs who remain bereft of origins that they can fashion into a commonality beyond the filial constraints of religion, nationalism and ideology.

Joyce and Doherty’s work share the search for an exit from the more crippling effects of history as it resonates in the memories of the living. Among the structural devices common to writer and artist is a critique of the medium of transmission, in itself an act of resistance against the manipulative use of words and images by vested interests. Both deploy multiple perspectives in acknowledgement that no single viewpoint can guarantee the ‘truth’ of the past. Moreover, Doherty’s work is as intimately associated with Derry and what it has come to signify as Joyce’s work is inseparable from Dublin; but if this is where their work

begins it is by no means where it ends. As Joyce said, ‘For myself I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal’.24 If a city can represent a ‘universal’, it is in the way place and lives are mutually articulated, where repetition may be a source of comfort or constraint, and memory a palliative or poison. Joyce described art as the production of ‘epiphanies’, and it is in its provocation of such insights that Doherty’s work may be seen as an ethics of memory and action that seeks a balance between a duty to forget and duty to remember, and a ‘space of agency through not predetermined concepts but percepts of living conditions’, 25 the ground from which a truly collective future may be wrought.

255

NOTES

1. Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (ed.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 5.

2. The actual quote is: ‘The past is consumed in the present, and the present is living only because it brings forth the future’. Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, [1916], London: Penguin, 1992, p. 286.

3. Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín, ‘Troubled Memories’, in Willie Doherty: False Memory, Dublin: IMMA and London: Merrill Publishers Ltd., 2002, pp. 19–25.

4. It is impossible to list all the relevant theorists here. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972) sets the tone; amongst subsequent influential authors one can cite Roland Barthes on photography in Image– Music–Text, (London: Fontana, 1977), alongside those included in Victor Burgin’s anthology, Thinking Photography (London: MacMillan, 1982).

5. Throughout British colonial history, legitimate grievances against the state have been demonised and silenced. Doherty’s initial use of voiceover relates to this strategy of silencing dissident positions, exemplified by the British government’s broadcast ban on Sinn Féin politicians, 1988–94, which resulted in the absurdity of actors voicing Sinn Féin statements.

6. Reprinted in Willie Doherty: Buried, Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009, unpaginated.

7. The Saville Inquiry was set up in 1998 under the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921.

8. De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Rendall, Steven F. (trans.), Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 86–87.

9. James Joyce, Ulysses [1918], http://www.geoffwilkins.net/wiki/Ulysses.pdf, p. 30.

10. Fisher, Jean, ‘Seeing Beyond the Pale’, in Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths, Cardiff: Ffotogallery, in association with the Orchard Gallery, Derry and Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1990, unpaginated.

11. Rowlands, Michael, ‘Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials’, in Forty, Adrian and Küchler, Susanne (ed.), The Art of Forgetting, Oxford: Berg, 1999, p. 131.

12. Doherty, Willie, ‘Some Notes on Problems and Possibilities’, text accompanying the catalogue Willie Doherty: Buried, op. cit., p. 156.

13. Amnesty was written into English law as the Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660, which ‘pardoned’ those dissenters not directly involved in the regicide of Charles 1st.

14. Kearney, R., ‘Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance’, in Kearney, R. and Dooley, M. (ed.), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, op. cit., p 27.

15. Ricoeur, P., ‘Memory and Forgetting’, op. cit.

16. Ricoeur, P., ‘Memory and Forgetting’, ibid.

17. Forty, A., ‘Introduction’, Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (ed.), The Art of Forgetting, op. cit., pp. 7–9. Amnesia indeed attends Unionism’s commemoration of its own contribution to the First World War, which annulled the memory of the 200,000 Irishmen who joined the British army and seventeen Catholics who were awarded the Victoria Cross. Quoted in Jarman, Neil, ‘Commemorating 1916, Celebrating Difference: Parading and Painting in Belfast’, in Forty, A. and Küchler, S., The Art of Forgetting, op. cit., p. 192.

18. Ricoeur, P., ‘Memory and Forgetting’, op. cit., p. 9.

19. As reflected in the title of the bronze sculpture, Hands Across the Divide, 1992, at the west end of Craigavon Bridge.

20. Hoare, Quintin and Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (trans. and ed.), Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.

21. Among Derry’s many ‘anomalies’ is that, unlike Belfast, the Catholic community formed the majority, and yet the Loyalist / Protestant minority historically controlled political, policing and economic powers.

As Doherty’s early work, notably The Walls, 1987 (p. 48), reminds us, the topography of the city reinforced this power relation, with Catholics primarily ‘without’ the walls, and the Protestants ‘within’.

22. Among the ironies evoked by Doherty’s work is that Derry Goal’s most famous inmate was the Anglican Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–98), whose aim to unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter as ‘Irishmen’ included appeals for working class solidarity: ‘Our independence must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not support us they must fall. We can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property’. The slogan God Has Not Failed Us refers to a Protestant minister’s endorsement of the authorities’ refusal to sanction a civil rights march whilst allowing the Apprentice Boys parade to go ahead, exacerbating discriminatory policing policies which precipitated the Battle of the Bogside, 1969.

23. Deleuze, Gilles, Essays Critical and Clinical, Smith, Daniel W. and Greco, Michael A. (trans.), London and New York: Verso, 1998, pp. 84–88.

24. James Joyce quoted in Deane, Seamus, ‘Introduction’, Joyce, J., Finnegans Wake, [1939], London: Penguin Books, 1992, p. xii.

25. Deleuze, Gilles, Essays Critical and Clinical, op. cit., pp. 84–88.

257

Appendices

260

List of Works

265

Selected Solo Exhibitions

267

Selected Group Exhibitions

270

Selected Bibliography

278

Artist’s Biography

278

Authors’ Biographies

279

Acknowledgements

259

List of Works

p. 2: Derry 1985 archival pigment print 31 × 45 cm / 12 ⅝ × 17 ⅝ in.

Edition for Matt’s Gallery, London, 2012 edition of 50 p. 9: Remains 2013 high definition video, colour and sound, 15 minutes edition of 3 p. 10: Dead Pool I 2011 c-type photograph 122 × 152 cm / 48 × 60 in. edition of 3 p. 11: Buried 2009 high definition video, colour and sound, 8 minutes edition of 3 p. 11: Ghost Story 2007 high definition video, colour and sound, 15 minutes edition of 3 p. 12: Non-Specific Threat 2004 video, colour and sound, 7 : 46 minutes edition of 3 p. 20: The Blue Skies of Ulster 1986 installation: Willie Doherty 17 January – 8 February, 1986 Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin photo: Willie Doherty

p. 21: Stone upon Stone 1986 installation: Stone upon Stone September 1986 Redemption Gallery, Derry photo: Willie Doherty

p. 37: The Sleep of Reason 1986 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. unique

p. 24: Fading Dreams 1989 black and white photographs with text triptych, each: 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

pp. 39–40: Stone upon Stone 1986 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. unique

p. 53: Home 1987 black and white photograph with text 61 × 152 cm / 24 × 60 in. unique

p. 25: Commitment / Investment 1989 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 43: Past to Present 1986 black and white photograph with text 152 × 51 cm / 60 × 20 in. unique

p. 55: The Other Side 1988 black and white photograph with text 61 × 152 cm / 24 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 45: Mesh 1986 black and white photograph with text 61 × 91 cm / 24 × 36 in. unique

p. 57: Believing 1988 c-type photograph with text 102 × 152 cm / 40 × 60 in. unique

p. 26: Closed Circuit 1989 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. pp. 32–33: Undercover / Unseen 1985 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 pp. 34–35: Fog: Ice / Last Hours of Daylight 1985 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 47: The Blue Skies of Ulster 1986 black and white photograph with text 46 × 152 cm / 18 × 60 in. unique p. 48: The Walls 1987 black and white photograph with text 61 × 152 cm / 24 × 60 in. unique

pp. 50–51: Protecting / Invading 1987 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 59: Dreaming 1988 c-type photograph with text 102 × 152 cm / 40 × 60 in. unique p. 61: Waiting 1988 c-type photograph with text 102 × 152 cm / 40 × 60 in. unique

pp. 62–63: Fractured / Encased 1989 black and white photographs with text diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 64: False Dawn 1990 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 67: God Has Not Failed Us 1990 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 69: Shifting Ground 1991 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 71: At the Verge 1992 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 73: Remote Control 1992 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 75: Last Bastion 1992 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 89: Ulster Will Fight / Ireland Unfree Shall Never be at Peace 1992 c-type photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 77: Enduring 1992 black and white photograph with text 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 90: Incident 1993 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

pp. 79–80: The Bridge 1992 black and white photographs diptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 83: Alleyway 1992 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 85: Wasteground 1992 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 87: Unapproved Road 1992 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 92: Incident II (Hijack) 1993 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 95: Face to Face The Irish are Insane p. 97: The Irish are Evil p. 99: The Irish are Pitiful 1993 cibachrome photographs triptych, each: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. unique Yale University Art Gallery Gift of Arthur Fleischer, Jr., B.A. 1953, LL.B. 1958 p. 100: Shadow of the Walls 1993 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 103: Border Road 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 104: Suburban Incident 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 107: Border Incident 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 pp. 108–109: Blocked Road 1994 cibachrome photographs diptych, each 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 111: The Outskirts 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 113: Border Road II 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 115: Abandoned Vehicle 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 116: Abandoned Vehicle II 1994 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

261

p. 119: Border Crossing 1994 c-type photograph 33 × 45 cm / 13 × 17 ⅝ in.

Photography Portfolio for the Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2011 edition of 30 p. 120: Minor Incident I 1994 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 121: Minor Incident II 1994 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 123: Unreported Incident 1995 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 124: Tyre Fragment 1995 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 125: Bullet Holes 1995 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 126: Unapproved Road II 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 129: At the Border I (Walking Towards a Military Checkpoint) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 131: At the Border II (Low Visibility) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 133: At the Border III (Trying to Forget the Past) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 135: At the Border IV (The Invisible Line) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 137: At the Border V (Isolated Incident) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 139: At the Border VI (Checkpoint) 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 140: Control Zone 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 143: Suspicious Vehicle 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 153: Windscreen Fragment 1996 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

p. 145: Tunnel 1995 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 154: Minor Incident III 1996 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

p. 146: Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over I 1995 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

p. 155: Minor Incident IV 1996 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

p. 147: Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over II 1995 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 148: Uncovering Evidence that the War is Not Over III 1996 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3 p. 151: The Fence 1996 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 152: Discarded Number Plate 1996 cibachrome photograph 77 × 105 cm / 30 × 40 in. edition of 3

p. 156: Border Crossing 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 159: Unreported Incident II 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 161: Last Occupant 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 163: Abandoned Interior I 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 165: Abandoned Interior II 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 179: Out of Sight 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 194: The Side of the Road 1999 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 207: Underpass at Dusk 2004 c-type photograph 122 × 152 cm / 48 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 167: Abandoned Interior III 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 181: Looking Back 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 197: Retraces I 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 209: Grey Day I 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

pp. 168–169: Small Acts of Deception I 1997 cibachrome photographs diptych: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in.

122 × 122 cm / 48 × 48 in. edition of 3

p. 183: The Road Ahead 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 198: Retraces II 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 210: Grey Day II 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

p. 185: Critical Distance 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 199: Retraces III 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 211: Grey Day III 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

p. 187: Searching 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 200: Retraces IV 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 212: Grey Day IV 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

p. 189: Crash Scene 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 201: Retraces V 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 213: Grey Day V 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

p. 191: Disused Border Crossing 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 202: Retraces VI 2002 black and white photograph 114 × 152 cm / 45 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 214: Grey Day VI 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

p. 193: No Visible Signs 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 205: Wire Fence and Blue Sky 2004 c-type photograph 122 × 152 cm / 48 × 60 in. edition of 3

p. 215: Grey Day VII 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3

pp. 170–171: Small Acts of Deception II 1997 cibachrome photographs diptych: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in.

122 × 122 cm / 48 × 48 in. edition of 3 pp. 172–173: Small Acts of Deception III 1997 cibachrome photographs diptych: 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in.

122 × 122 cm / 48 × 48 in. edition of 3 p. 175: Out of the Shadows I 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 177: Out of the Shadows II 1997 cibachrome photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

263

p. 216: Grey Day VIII 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3 p. 217: Grey Day IX 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3 p. 218: Grey Day X 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3 p. 219: Grey Day XI 2007 black and white photograph 102.5 × 87.5 cm / 40 ⅜ × 34 ½ in. edition of 3 p. 221: Flyover Ghost Walk 1985 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 223: Wasteland Endless 1985 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 225: Silence After a Kneecapping 1985 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 227: To the Border A Fork in the Road The place where Ciaran Doherty was executed in February 2010; accused of being a British informer he was abducted two hours before his body was dumped at the side of the road.

1986 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 229: Between Failed Housing Project 1987 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 230: Enclave Dividing Wall 1987 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 233: Back The Walls 1991 / 2013 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 235: Hoarfrost Unapproved Border Crossing 1991 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3 p. 237: Face Down Alleyway Used for Cover on January 30th, 1972 1992 / 2012 black and white photograph 81 × 122 cm / 32 × 48 in. edition of 3

p. 239: Against the Wall Alleyway Used for Cover on January 30th, 1972 1992 / 2013 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 252: Small Acts of Deception I 1997 installation: Eugenio Dittborn, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum and Doris Salcedo 10 January – 28 February, 1998 Alexander and Bonin, New York

p. 240: Headlights Border Road at Dusk 1993 / 2012 black and white photograph 122 × 183 cm / 48 × 72 in. edition of 3

p. 253: 30th January 1972 (detail) 1993 two-screen tape / slide installation unique

p. 243: Remains (Estate) 2013 c-type photograph 120 × 160 cm / 47 × 63 in. edition of 3 p. 245: Remains (Along the Wall) 2013 c-type photograph 120 × 160 cm / 47 × 63 in. edition of 3 p. 247: Remains (Kneecapping at Gartan Square) 2013 c-type photograph 120 × 160 cm / 47 × 63 in. edition of 3 p. 248: Remains (Kneecapping Behind Creggan Shops) 2013 c-type photograph 120 × 160 cm / 47 × 63 in. edition of 3 p. 251: False Dawn 1990 48-sheet billboard, Dublin photo: Willie Doherty

p. 253: The Only Good One is a Dead One 1993 installation: 10 November, 1993 – 30 January, 1994 Matt’s Gallery, London photo: John Riddy p. 254: At the Verge 1992 installation: One Place Twice, Photo / Text / 85 / 92 28 January – 10 March, 2012 Alexander and Bonin, New York photo: Joerg Lohse

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013

2008

2003

Willie Doherty, Emi Fontana, Milan

UNSEEN, City Factory Gallery, Derry

Willie Doherty, Void, Derry

Secretion, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Willie Doherty, The Third Space, Belfast

Willie Doherty, De Appel, Amsterdam

Somewhere Else, Tate Gallery, Liverpool

Without Trace, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

The Visitor, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin

2002

Same Old Story, Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble

2012

Replays: Selected Video Works 1994–2007, Matt’s Gallery, London

One Place Twice, Photo / Text / 85 / 92, Alexander and Bonin, New York

2007

Retraces, Matt’s Gallery, London

1997

Ghost Story, Northern Ireland Pavillon, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice

2001

Willie Doherty, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

How It Was / Double Take, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast

Same Old Story, Matt’s Gallery, London

Extracts from a File, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Same Old Story, Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick; Firstsite, Colchester

Willie Doherty, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg

2000

Willie Doherty, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Passage, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Extracts from a File, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

Willie Doherty, Galerie Françoise Knabe, Frankfurt am Main

2006

Extracts from a File, daad-Galerie, Berlin

Empty, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Extracts from a File, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen

The Only Good One is a Dead One, Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta

Out of Position, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City

Extracts from a File, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

2005

1999

The Only Good One is a Dead One, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario

Apparatus, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Dark Stains, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian

The Only Good One is a Dead One, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

2009

Apparatus, Galería Pepe Cobo, Madrid

1996

Buried, Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea

Willie Doherty, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

Willie Doherty – New Photographs and Video, Alexander and Bonin, New York

One Place Twice, Photo / Text / 85 / 92, Matt’s Gallery, London Disturbance, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne Lapse, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin Secretion, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 2011 Buried, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Traces, The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky Willie Doherty: Disturbance, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin 2010 Unfinished, Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Pamplona Lack, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Passages, Prefix Photo, Toronto Requisite Distance, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Buried, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Three Potential Endings, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

Willie Doherty, Stories, Stadische Galerie im Lenbachaus und Kunstbau, Munich

False Memory, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Unknown Male Subject, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Same Old Story, Firstsite, Colchester

2004

Somewhere Else, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

Non-Specific Threat, Alexander and Bonin, New York

True Nature, The Renaissance Society, Chicago

Non-Specific Threat, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

1998 Willie Doherty, Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris

Willie Doherty, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles

The Only Good One is a Dead One, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

In the Dark. Projected Works by Willie Doherty, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern In the Dark. Projected Works by Willie Doherty, Kunstverein München, Munich Willie Doherty, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris Willie Doherty, Alexander and Bonin, New York

265

The Only Good One is a Dead One, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon Willie Doherty, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan

Kunst Europa, Six Irishmen, Kunstverein Schwetzingen, Schwetzingen

1995

Unknown Depths, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; ICA, London

Willie Doherty, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

1990

Willie Doherty, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

Unknown Depths, Ffotogallery, Cardiff; Third Eye Center, Glasgow; Orchard Gallery, Derry

Willie Doherty, Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris 1994 At the End of the Day, British School at Rome, Rome The Only Good One is a Dead One, Grey Art Gallery, New York 1993 The Only Good One is a Dead One, Matt’s Gallery, London Willie Doherty, Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris They’re all the Same, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdoski Castel, Warsaw 30th January 1972, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 1992 Willie Doherty, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich Willie Doherty, Tom Cugliani Gallery, New York Willie Doherty, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin 1991 Willie Doherty, Tom Cugliani Gallery, New York Willie Doherty, Galerie Giovanna Minelli, Paris

Imagined Truths, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin Same Difference, Matt’s Gallery, London 1988 Two Photoworks, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow Colourworks, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin 1987 The Town of Derry, Photoworks, Art & Research Exchange, Belfast 1986 Photoworks, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin Stone Upon Stone, Redemption!, Derry 1982 Siren, an installation, Art & Research Exchange, Belfast Collages, Orchard Gallery, Derry 1980 Installation, Orchard Gallery, Derry

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013 Picturing Derry, City Factory Gallery, Derry Colección Helga de Alvear – The Art of the Present, CentroCentro Cibeles de Cultura y Ciudadanía, Madrid Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography, MAC, Belfast Exposed, Belfast Concrete – Photography and Architecture, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur Border Cultures: Part One (Homes, Land), Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art, BOZAR, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels Looking at the View, Tate Britain, London Secretion, Permanent Collection, Neue Galerie, Kassel 2012 Stimuli, Alexander and Bonin, New York dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel 2011 Dublin Contemporary: A Terrible Beauty, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin Aschemünder, Sammlung Goetz im Haus der Kunst, Haus der Kunst, Munich Moving Portraits, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea ANGRY, Young and Radical, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam 2010 Manifesta 8, Murcia THE LAND BETWEEN US, Place, Power & Dislocation, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Buried, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny

Stay alive till ’95, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Faces in the Crowd, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin

Willie Doherty, Victor Grippo, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Venice at Farmleigh: Works by Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne from the Venice Biennale, Farmleigh Gallery, Phoenix Park, Dublin

Format 05, Q Gallery, Derby

On the Margins, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis

2004

A New Order, Works from the Collection, Ulster Museum, Belfast A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Fear and Terror, Galleria Gentili, Prato 2009 Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Archiving Place and Time, Holden Gallery, Manchester; Millennium Court Art Centre, Portadown; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton

2007 GOING STAYING, Movement, Body, Place in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum, Bonn Speed 3, IVAM – Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno Centre Julio González, Valencia Turbulence, 3rd Auckland Triennale, Auckland

EV+A, 2009, Reading the City, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick

2006

Pequena historia da fotografía, CGAC – Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela

Reprocessing Reality, P.S.1, Long Island City, New York

2008 Fifty Percent Solitude, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Re: Location, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, The Art Gallery of The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York

Slideshow, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore

Faces in the Crowd: The Modern Figure and Avant-Garde Realism, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Dwellen, Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen Glocal: Apuntes para Videopresentaciones de lo global y lo local, Galeria Moisés de Albéniz, Pamplona Recherche entdeckt!, 6. Internationale Foto-Triennale, Esslingen 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2003 Cambio de Valores, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló The Turner Prize 2003, Tate Gallery, London Moving Pictures, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao Poetic Justice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul

Nature, Space and Time, Recent Acquisitions, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

ARS 06, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

Site Specific, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Venice in Belfast, Works by Willie Doherty and Gerard Byrne, The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast

2005

Imperfect Marriages, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan

Peripheral Vision and Collective Body, Museion, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano The Morning After: Videoarbeiten der Sammlung Goetz, Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen

The Experience of Art, Italian Pavilion, 51st International Art Exhibition, Venice The Shadow, Vestsjaellands Kunstmuseum, Soro Non-Stop, Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg Reprocessing Reality, Château de Nyon, Nyon

Art Unlimited, Basel Re-Run, Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim 2002 Selection of work from the XXV Bienal de São Paulo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago

267

Retraces, Alexander and Bonin, New York The Gap Show, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund Formal Social, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster Re-Run, XXV Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo 2001 Das Innere Befinden: Das Bild des Menschen in der Videokunst der 90er Jahre / The Inner State, The Image of Man in the Video Art of 1990s, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz Trauma, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee The Uncertain, Galería Pepe Cobo, Seville Bloody Sunday, Orchard Gallery, Derry Double Vision, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig

Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Boston; Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, St Johns; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh and Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago

Real / Life: New British Art, Tochigi Prefecturial Museum of Fine Arts, Fukuoka City Art Museum, Fukuoka; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima; Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

Endzeit – Fotografien und Videoarbeiten, Galerie Six Friedrich Lisa Ungar, Munich

A Sense of Place, Angels Gallery, Los Angeles

Insight-Out, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg and Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz

1997

Nouvelles Acquisitions 97, Collège Trois-Fontaines, Reims

Between Lantern and Laser, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle

Photographs, Alexander and Bonin, New York

Citta / Natura, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

Junge britische und amerikanische Kunst aus der Sammlung Goetz, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg

New Found Land Scape, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

1998 New Art From Britain, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck

2000

Fuori Uso ’98, Mercati Ortofrutticoli, Pescara

Erste Arbeiten bei Kilchmann, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich 1999 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Endzeit Transart, Charim Galerie, Vienna Expansive Vision: Recent Acquisitions of Photographs in the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas

Eugenio Dittborn, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, Doris Salcedo, Alexander and Bonin, New York

1998 / 99

Gisela Bullacher / Willie Doherty, Produzentengalerie, Hamburg

Drive: Power>Progress>Desire, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand

Summer Show, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Critical Distance: Michael Danner, Willie Doherty, Sophy Rickett, Andrew Mummery Gallery, London Photography as Concept. 4., Internationale Foto-Triennale, Esslingen Art from the UK (Part II), Sammlung Goetz, Munich Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Re / View. Photographs from the Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas No Place (Like Home), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Installations / Projects, P.S.1, Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York Face à l’Histoire 1933–1996, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Being & Time: The Emergence of Video Projection, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Language, Mapping and Power, Orchard Gallery, Derry Happy End, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Jurassic Technologies: Revenant, The 10th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney NowHere, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek 1996 IMMA Collection: Photoworks, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Sites of Being, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 1995 MMA / Glen Dimplex Artists Award, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Willie Doherty, Andreas Gursky, Moderna Museet, Stockholm Trust, Tramway, Glasgow It’s Not a Picture, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan New Art In Britain, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz

ID, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Distant Relations, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Camden Arts Centre, London and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Circumstantial Evidence: Terry Atkinson, Willie Doherty, John Goto, University of Brighton, Brighton

Double Play – Beyond Cognition, Sint-Niklaas City Academy, Sint-Niklaas

Distant Relations: A Dialogue Among Chicano, Irish and Mexican Artists, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles

1994 Cocido y Crudo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid The Turner Prize 1994, Tate Gallery, London

Willie Doherty / Mona Hatoum / Doris Salcedo, Brooke Alexander, New York Points of Interest, Points of Departure, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco From Beyond the Pale: Selected Works and Projects, Part 1, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Kraji Places, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubliana The Spine, De Appel, Amsterdam

1991

1988

Shocks to the System, Royal Festival Hall, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Three Artists, Battersea Arts Centre, London

Storie, Galeria il Campo, Rome; Galeria Casoli, Milan

1988 / 87

Europe Unknown, WKS Wawel, Krakow A Place for Art?, The Showroom, London

Ireland / Germany Exchange, Guiness Hop Store, Dublin and Ulster Museum, Belfast 1987 Directions Out, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

The Act of Seeing (Urban Space), Fondation pour l’Architecture, Brussels

Outer Space, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Camden Arts Centre, London; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol

1993

Political Landscapes, Perspektief, Rotterdam

A Line of Country, Cornerhouse, Manchester

Denonciation, Usine Fromage, Darnetal and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona

Colourworks, Oliver Dowling Gallery, Dublin

1990

Points of View, Heritage Library, Derry

An Irish Presence, Venice Biennale, Venice Prospect 93, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Graz Critical Landscapes, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo Krieg (War), Neue Galerie Graz, Graz 1992 Spielhölle, Bockenheimer / University Underground Station, Frankfurt Time Bandits, Galleria Fac-Simile, Milan Moltiplici Culture, Convento di S. Egidio, Rome

The British Art Show, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow; Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds; Hayward Gallery, London XI Photography Symposium Exhibition, Graz

1985

1983 Days and Nights, A Slidework, Art and Research Exchange, Belfast Live Work, Artspace, Cork

A New Tradition, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

New Artists, New Works, Project Centre, Dublin

1989

1982

Three Artists, London Street, Derry

New Artists, New Works, Orchard Gallery, Derry

13 Critics 26 Photographers, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona

Through the Looking Glass, Barbican Arts Centre, London

Outta Here, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow

I Internationale Foto-Triennale, Esslingen

Beyond Glory: Re-presenting Terrorism, College of Art, Maryland Institute, Baltimore

The State of the Nation, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry

Live Work, Cresent Art Centre, Belfast 1981

1988 / 89

Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Dublin

Matter of Facts, Musée des BeauxArts, Nantes; Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Étienne; Metz pour la Photographie, Metz

Work Made Live, National College of Art and Design, Dublin

269

Selected Bibliography

Selected Solo Exhibition Catalogues and Monographs 2013 Willie Doherty: Secretion (exh. cat.), Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art 2012 One Place Twice (exh. cat.), New York and London: Alexander and Bonin, Matt’s Gallery. Text by Declan Long Lapse (exh. cat.), Dublin: Kerlin Gallery. Text by Isabel Nolan 2011 Traces (exh. cat.), Louisville: Speed Art Museum. Text by Suzanne Weaver Willie Doherty: Disturbance (exh. cat.), Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Texts by Colin Graham and Barbara Dawson Willie Doherty: Unfinished (exh. cat.), Pamplona: Galería Moisés Peréz de Albéniz. Text by Peo Aguirre 2009 Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance (exh. cat.), New Haven: Yale University Press. Text by Charles Wylie Willie Doherty: Buried (exh. cat.), Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery. Text by Fiona Bradley 2008

2007

1998

1990

Ghost Story: Willie Doherty (exh. cat.), Belfast: The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The British Council, and The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure. Texts by Daniel Jewesbury and Declan Long

Willie Doherty: Somewhere Else (exh. cat.), Liverpool: Tate Gallery, in association with the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT).

Text by Ian Hunt

Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths (exh.cat.), Cardiff, Derry and Glasgow; Ffotogallery, Third Eye Centre and Orchard Gallery.

Text by Jean Fisher

Willie Doherty: Anthology of Time-Based Works (exh. cat.), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Texts by Yilmaz Dziewior, Francis McKee and Matthias Mühling

1997

2006

1996

Willie Doherty: Out of Position (exh. cat.), Mexico City: Laboratorio Arte Alameda. Texts by Jean Fisher and Príamo Lozada

Willie Doherty (exh. cat.), Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Text by Olivier Zahm

2002 Willie Doherty: False Memory, London: Merrell Publishers Limited.

Texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Willie Doherty: True Nature (exh. cat.), Chicago: The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago. Text by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith 2001 Willie Doherty: How it Was (exh. cat.), Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery.

Text by Daniel Jewesbury 2000

Willie Doherty: The Visitor (exh. cat.), Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College

Willie Doherty: Extracts from a File (exh. cat.), Berlin: DAAD. Texts by Friedrich Meschede, Eva Schmidt and Hans-Joachim Neubauer

Willie Doherty: Scripts & Credits (exh. cat.), London: Matt’s Gallery

1999 Willie Doherty: Dark Stains (exh. cat.), San Sebastian: Koldo Mitxelena. Texts

by Maite Lorés and Martin McLoone

Willie Doherty: Same Old Story. (exh. cat.), London: Matt’s Gallery.

Texts by Martin McLoone and Jeffrey Kastner

Willie Doherty: In the Dark. Projected Works (exh. cat.), Bern: Kunsthalle Bern. Texts by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev and Ulrich Loock Willie Doherty: The Only Good One is a Dead One (exh. cat.), Edmonton and Saskatoon: The Edmonton Art Gallery, Mendel Art Gallery. Text by Jean Fisher Willie Doherty: No Smoke Without Fire (exh. cat.), London: Matt’s Gallery 1994 At the End of the Day (exh. cat.), Rome: British School at Rome. Text

by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 1993 Willie Doherty: Partial View (exh. cat.), Dublin, New York and London: The Douglas Hyde Gallery; Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, and Matt’s Gallery. Text by Dan Cameron

Selected Group Exhibition Catalogues and Books 2013 Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography (exh. cat.), Belfast: Belfast Exposed Photography and MAC. Text by Colin Graham Colección Helga de Alvear: The Art of the Present (exh. cat.), Madrid: CentroCentro Cibeles de Cultura y Ciudadanía. Texts by Maria de Corral López-Doriga and Julián Rodríguez Concrete – Photography and Architecture (exh. cat.), Winterthur: Fotomuseum Winterthur. Daniela Janser and Thomas Seelig (ed.)

Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art (exh. cat.), Brussels: BOZAR. Brian Cass and Christina Kennedy (ed.)

2009 L’effroi du présent: Figurer la violence, Paris: Flammarion. Text

by Dominique Baqué 2008 BESart, Banco Espírito Santo Collection, The Present: An Infinite Dimension, Lisbon: Museu Colecçã Berardo Peripheral Vision & Collective Body (exh. cat.), Bolzano: Museion.

Corinne Diserens (ed.)

Revolutions–Forms That Turn (exh. cat.), Sydney and London: The Biennale of Sydney, Thames & Hudson. Text by Carolyn Christov-Barakgiev 2007

2012

Going Staying: Movement, Body, Space in Contemporary Art (exh. cat.), Bonn: Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Text by Volker Adolphs

dOCUMENTA (13) The Book of Books / The Logbook / The Guidebook (exh. cat.), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chús Martinez and Franco Berardi (ed.)

Artworks: The Progressive Collection, New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Texts by Dan Cameron, Peter B. Lewis, Toby Devan Lewis and Mark Schwartz

Verlangen naar Volmaaktheid (exh. cat.) Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum. Text by Evert van Straaten

On the Margins (exh. cat.), St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis. Texts by Carmon Colangelo, Eleanor Heartney and Paul Krainak

2011 Aschemünder: Sammlung Goetz im Haus der Kunst (exh. cat.), Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Ingvild Goetz (ed.)

2010 Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety (exh. cat.), Cork: Crawford Art Gallery. Peter Murray and William M. Laffan (ed.)

Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art (exh. cat.), Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press. María de Corral and John R. Lane (ed.)

Willie Doherty, Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial 2007 (exh. cat.), Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Text by Jean Fisher Regarding Fear and Hope (exh. cat.), Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art. Text by Victoria Lynn 2006 Alabama Chrome, Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery. Text by Declan Long Naturaleza: PHE06, Madrid: La Fabrica Editorial. Text by Tevi de la Torre ARS 06: Toden tuntu, Sense of the Real (exh. cat.), Helsinki: Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Text

by Mark Durden. Tuula Karjalainen and Marja Sakari (ed.)

Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict (exh. cat.), New York: Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program. Text by Stamatina Gregory The Portrait Now, London: National Portrait Gallery. Texts by Sarah Howgate and Sandy Nairne Ögonvittne / EyeWitness (exh. cat.), Helsingborg: Moderna Museet and Dunkers Kulturhus. AnnCatrin Gummesson and Kirse JungeStevnsborg (ed.)

2005 Poetic Justice: 8th International Istanbul Biennial (exh. cat.), Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. Text by Dan Cameron Belonging: Sharjah Biennial 7 (exh. cat.), Sharjah: Sharjah Art Museum. Text by Jean Fisher The Experience of Art: 51st International Art Exhibition (exh. cat.), Venice: La Biennale di Venezia. Text by Jean Fisher

PREPOSSESSION, Sydney: Ivan Dougherty Gallery. Interview by Liam Kelly, ‘Marking Time and Place: Liam Kelly interviews Willie Doherty and Frances Hegarty’ Willie Doherty, Reprocessing Reality, Zürich: JRP | Ringier. Text by Claudia Spinelli If Walls Had Ears, Amsterdam: De Appel. Edna Van Duyn (ed.)

Slide Show, Projected Images in Contemporary Art (exh.cat.)

Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Pennsylvania State University Press. Texts by Darsie Alexander, Charles Harrison and Robert Storr 2004 Pour un nouvel art politique: De l’art contemporain au documentaire, Paris: Flammarion. Text by Dominique Baqué Paisatges Després de la Batalla (exh. cat.), Lleida: Centre d’Art La Panera. Texts by Adan Kovacsics, Victor Molina, Glòria Picazo, Antoni Puigverd, Àngel Quintana 2003 The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, London: Tate Publishing. Text by Virginia Button 2002 Imagine, You Are Standing Here In Front Of Me: The Caldic Collection in the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (exh. cat.), Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Texts by Boris Groys and Sven Lütticken Países, 25 Bienal de São Paulo (exh. cat.), São Paulo: Fundação Bienal São Paulo. Text by Daniel Jewesbury

271

RE-RUN (exh. broch.), 25 Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo: The British Council.

Text by Charles Merewether 2001 In Cold Blood (exh. cat.), New York: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art L’Instant-Monument, Montréal: Dazibao. Text by Vincent Lavoie The Inner State: The Image of Man in the Video Art of the 1990s (exh. cat.), Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. Text by Aoife Mac Namara Double Vision (exh. cat.), Leipzig: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst; Berlin: DAAD, London: The British Council. Text by Andrea Schlieker

Landscape (exh. cat.), London: The British Council. Ann Gallagher (ed.)

Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (exh. cat.), New York: Independent Curators International. Declan McGonagle, Fintan O’Toole and Kim Levin (ed.)

Le Mois de la photo à Montréal (exh. cat.), Montréal: VOX, Centre de diffusion de la photographie. AnneMarie Ninacs, Marie-Josée Jean and Pierre Blache (ed.)

New Media in Late 20th Century Art, London: Thames & Hudson. Text by Michael Rush War Zones (exh. cat.), Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery. Texts

by Zdenka Badovinac, Sue Malvern, Bob Sherrin

2000 Shifting Ground: Selected Works of Irish Art 1950–2000 (exh. cat.), Dublin: The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Texts by Bruce Arnold, Declan McGonagle, Oliver Dowling, Medb Ruane, Dorothy Walker and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Drive: Power>Progress>Desire (exh. cat.), New Plymouth: GovettBrewster Art Gallery. Text by Gregory Burke Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (exh. cat.), Montréal: The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. Text by Dominique Païni and Guy Cogeval

1998 New Art from Britain (exh. cat.), Innsbruck: Kunstraum Innsbruck.

Elisabeth Thoman-Oberhofer (ed.)

Real / Life: New British Art (exh. cat.), Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Fukoma Art Museum; Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art; Ashiya City Museum of Art & History. Texts by James Roberts et al Grand Street: Memory 64, New York: Grand Street Press. Jean Stein (ed.)

1997

1999 1999 Carnegie International (exh. cat.), Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art . Madeleine Grynsztejn (ed.)

Des conflicts intérieurs (exh. cat.), Cherbourg-Octeville: Saison Photographique d’Octeville

Citta / Nattura (exh. cat.), Rome: Fratelli Palombi Editori. Text by Sabina De Cavi Dimensions Variable (exh. cat.), London: The British Council.

Ann Gallagher (ed.)

No Place (Like Home) (exh. cat.), Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.

Richard Flood (ed.)

The Bread and Butter Stone, Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery. John Hutchinson (ed.)

Art from the UK (exh. cat.), Munich, Sammlung Goetz. Christiane Meyer-Stoll (ed.)

Identité (exh. cat.), Villeurbanne: FRAC Rhône-Alps / Le Nouveau Musée / Institut. Text by Jean Fisher Pictura Britannica, Art from Britain (exh. cat.), Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. Bernice Murphy (ed.)

1996 Face à l’Histoire 1933–1996 (exh. cat.), Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou.

Jean-Paul Ameline (ed.)

ID (exh. cat.), Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van AbbeMuseum. Text by Jean Fisher Circumstantial Evidence: Terry Atkinson, Willie Doherty, John Goto (exh. cat.), Brighton: University of Brighton. Texts by David Green and Peter Seddon Jurassic Technologies: Revenant (exh. cat.), Sydney: 10th Biennale of Sydney. Lynne Cooke (ed.)

Language, Mapping and Power (exh. cat.), Derry: Orchard Gallery.

Text by Liam Kelly Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland, Kinsale: Gandon Editions. Text by Liam Kelly Being & Time: The Emergence of Video Projection (exh. cat.), Buffalo, New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Text by Marc Mayer NowHere (exh. cat.), Humelbaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Lars Nittve (ed.)

1995 Distant Relations: A Dialogue Among Chicano, Irish and Mexican Artists (exh. cat.), Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Museum of Art. Trisha Ziff (ed.)

IMMA / Glen Dimplex Artists Award (exh. cat.), Dublin: The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Brenda McParland (ed.)

Make Believe (exh. cat.), London: Royal College of Art. Maurits Sillem and Andrea Tarsia (ed.)

New Art in Britain (exh. cat.), Lodz: Muzeum Sztuki. Maria Morzuch (ed.)

1994 Cocido y Crudo (exh. cat.), Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Texts by Jean Fisher, Dan Cameron, Gerardo Mosquera, Jerry Saitz and Mar Villaespesa From Beyond the Pale: Art and Artists at the Edge of Consensus (exh. cat.), Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art. Declan McGonagle (ed.)

Kraji / Places (exh. cat.), Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art. Text by Lara Strumej The Act of Seeing (Urban Space) (exh. cat.), Brussels: Fondation pour l’Architecture. Texts by Moritz Küng, Katrien Vandermarliere and Oscar van den Boogaard The Spine (exh. cat.), Amsterdam: De Appel. Saskia Bos (ed.)

Turner Prize 1994 (exh. cat.), London: Tate Gallery. Text by Virginia Button 1993 Krieg (War) (exh. cat.), Graz: Edition Camera Austria. Werner Fenz, Christine Frisinghelli (ed.)

Prospect 93 (exh. cat.), Frankfurt: Frankfurter Kunstverein. Peter Weiermair (ed.)

Critical Landscapes (exh. cat.), Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Texts by Norihiro Katō and Michiko Kasahara 1992 Molteplici Culture (exh. cat.), Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (ed.)

13 Critics 26 Photographers (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Centre d’Art Santa Monica

1989 I International Foto-Triennale (exh. cat.), Esslingen: Galerie der Stadt. Texts by Alexander Tolnay and Knut Wilhelm Through the Looking Glass (exh. cat.), London: Barbican Art Gallery.

Texts by Gerry Badger and John Benton-Harris 1988 Matter of Facts (exh. cat.), Nantes: Musée des Beaux Arts; SaintÉtienne: Musee d’Art Moderne; Metz: Metz pour la Photographie.

James Lingwood (ed.)

1991

Selected Reviews and Articles 2013 Rosenmeyer, Aoife, ‘Willie Doherty’, Art Review, April. See: http:// artreview.com/reviews/web_ review_willie_doherty_galerie_ peter_kilchmann_zurich_2013/ Jaeggi, Martin, ‘On the Edge’, Aperture, 29 March. See: http:// www.aperture.org/2013/03/ on-the-edge/ ‘From Where I’m Standing, Looking at the View at Tate Britain: Penelope Curtis, Willie Doherty, Fiona Crisp’, Tate Etc. Issue 27, Spring, pp. 92–101

Outer Space: 8 Photo and Video Installations (exh. cat.), London: South Bank Centre. Alexandra Noble (ed.)

1987

2012

An Interview, Dublin: Oliver Dowling Gallery. Declan McGonagle and Willie Doherty

Shortall, Eithne, ‘Troubles in Mind’, The Sunday Times, 3 June

Denonciation (exh. cat.), Paris: La Difference-GNAC. Corinne Diserens (ed.)

Ireland / Germany Exchange. Dublin: Goethe-Institut and Arts Council of Ireland

Inheritance and Transformation, Dublin: The Irish Museum of Modern Art. Declan McGonagle (ed.)

A Line of Country (exh. cat.), Manchester: Cornerhouse

Kunst Europa, Berlin: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Kunstvereine Europe Unknown (exh. cat.), Krakow: Polish Ministry of Culture Shocks to the System (exh. cat.), London: South Bank Centre. Isobel Johnstone and Roger Malbert (ed.)

1990 A New Tradition (exh. cat.), Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery. Texts by Joan Fowler and John Roberts The British Art Show (exh. cat.), London: South Bank Centre. Texts by Caroline Collier and Lesley McRae

Directions Out (exh. cat.), Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery. Text by Brian McAvera Guinness Peat Aviation Exhibition.

Dublin. Text by Dorothy Walker 1982 8 Weeks 8 Works, Derry: Orchard Gallery. Declan McGonagle (ed.)

Dunne, Aidan, ‘Lapse’, The Irish Times, 1 June Pietsch, Hans ‘dOCUMENTA (13), Willie Doherty’, Art, Das Kunstmagazin, June, p. 98 Dodds, Jonathan, ‘Willie Doherty’, Socialist Review, May, p. 33 Veysey, Iris ‘Willie Doherty: Photo / Text / 85 / 92 at Matt’s Gallery’, vignettemagazine.com Decter, Joshua, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, May, pp. 309–310 Nathan, Emily, ‘Willie Doherty, One Place Twice’, Photo / Text / 85 / 92, 10 February, http://www.artnet. com/magazineus/news/new-yorklist-2-10-12.asp Clark, Robert, ‘Willie Doherty, Wolverhampton’, The Guardian, 7 January, http://www.guardian. co.uk/artanddesign/2012/ jan/07/this-weeks-newexhibitions?INTCMP=SRCH

2011 Siddiqui, Yasmeen M., ‘Haunted Gaze’, The Louisville Paper, 6 December, http://www.thelouis villepaper.com/2011/12/06/ haunted-gaze ‘The Speed Art Museum Presents Exhibition by Willie Doherty: Traces’, Art Daily, 14 October, http:// www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_ sec=2&int_new=51088&b=willie% 20doherty RTÉ Television – The View programme, 20 September. Review of ‘Disturbance’ at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, by cultural commentators: Irish Times online editor Hugh Linehan, art critic Cristín Leach and author and National Women’s Council Director Susan McKay 2009 Clancy, Luke, ‘Willie Doherty: Three Potential Endings’, ArtReview, 27 November, http://www.art review.com/forum/topics/ willie-doherty-three-potential Bird, Nicky, ‘Willie Doherty’, Art Monthly, June Macmillan, Duncan, ‘Willie Doherty’, The Scotsman, 12 May, http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/ features/Visual-arts-review-WillieDoherty.5255663.jp Genocchio, Benjamin, ‘A Sampling of What’s On’, The New York Times, 16 March Jeffrey, Moira, ‘Willie Doherty, Buried’, The Scotsman, 3 May, http:// living.scotsman.com/art-reviews/ Art-review-Willie-DohertyBuried.5228382.jp

273

Lack, Jessica, ‘Artist of the week 38: Willie Doherty’, The Guardian, 22 April, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2009/apr/22/williedoherty-artist-of-the-week-troubles

Wainwright, Jean, ‘Willie Doherty’, KultureFlash, January, www. kultureflash.com

Scharrer, Eva, ‘Biennale Venedig’, Kunst-Bulletin, July–August, pp. 42–48

Wainwright, Jean, ‘Willie Doherty: Replays’, Art Review, April

Schellen, Petra, ‘Figuren, die keinen Ausweg sehen’, Taz Nord, 21 May, p. 23

Ross, Christine, ‘The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited’, Art Journal, Fall

2008

2007

Coxhead, Gabriel, ‘Troubles in Mind’, Time Out London, 23–29 January

Büsing, Nicole and Heiko, Klaas, ‘Im Netz der Angst’, Kieler Nachrichten, 1 June

Scherf, Martina, ‘Gespenster der Vergangenheit’, Suddeütsche Zeitung, 27 September–3 October

Scharrer, Eva, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, December, www.artforum.com/picks

Coxhead, Gabriel, ‘Critics’ Choice: Willie Doherty’, Time Out London, 18 January

Schulze, Karin, ‘Willie Doherty’, Financial Times Deutschland, May

Fell-Zeller, Judith, ‘Abseits der Irland-Romantik’, Hamburger Morgenpost, 20 May 20, p. 17

Völzke, Daniel, ‘Der irisch Künstler Willie Doherty zeigt neue Videound Fotoarbeiten in der Galerie Nordenhake’, Tagespiegel, 14 January

Fusco, Maria, ‘All Eyes on Northern Ireland’, The Architects’ Journal, March, p. 51

Gardener, Belinda Grace, ‘Grauzonen des Daseins’, Kunstzeitung, September, p. 14

Fusco, Maria, ‘Willie Doherty’, Frieze, April, pp. 158–161

Gärtner, Barbara, ‘PreView: Willie Doherty’, Monopol, September, pp. 114–117

Wrba, Mathias, ‘Willie Doherty: Stories’, Camera Austria, No. 101, pp. 47–48 Otten, Liam, ‘Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to present On the Margins’, Washington University in St. Louis, 14 January, http:// news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/ normal/10820.html Sardo, Delfim, ‘Grey Day I, II, IV, VIII, X’, Courrier internacional, October Sardo, Delfim, ‘Grey Day I, II, IV, VIII, X’, Única, 10 May Suchin, Peter, ‘Willie Doherty Replays’, Art Monthly, March ‘Selected Exhibitions: Willie Doherty’, Art World, London, No. 3, February / March ‘Willie Doherty’, Dazed & Confused, No. 58, February ‘Ghost Story London’, The Guardian (Guide), London, 26 January– 1 February

Herrndorf, Ursula, ‘Die Mehrdeutigkeit entschlüsseln’, Hamburger Abendblatt, June, p. 8 Herrndorf, Ursula, ‘Unmittelbarer Appell an Emotionen’, Museumswelt, June–August ‘Im Netz der Angst’, Kunstmarkt.com, 23 May

Ulleheimer, Jens, ‘Die Ausstellung von Willie Doherty im Kunstverein Hamburg’, Kunstchau Hamburg, 17 May

2005

Vetrocq, Marcia E., ‘Venice Biennale review’, Art in America, September

Iles, Chrissie, ‘Venice Biennial 2005’, Frieze, No. 93, September, pp. 98–100

‘Unbestimmte Angst vor etwas Schrecklichem’, Die Welt, 22 May

Durden, Mark, ‘Willie Doherty: Non-Specific Threat’, Portfolio, June, pp. 62–65

‘Willie Doherty’, Monopol, No. 5 , May, p. 121 Wilson, Michael. ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, New York, No. 7, March, p. 314 2006 Blanco, Sergio R, ‘Mira Doherty al centro’, Reforma, 26 September

Léith, Caoimhín Mac Giolla, ‘TransEurope Express: An Overview’, Frieze, September, pp. 124–127

Ceballos, Miguel Angel, ‘Cuestiona con arte el fundamentalismo’, El Universal, 26 September

Luz, Katrin, ‘Willie Doherty’, Kunstforum International, November, pp. 386–388

Cohen, David, ‘The Dark Side of Summer’, The New York Sun, 15 June

Reber, Simone, ‘Unbehaglich, Unheimlich, Uneindeutig’, Deutchlandradio Kultur, 19 May Sachs, Britta, ‘Das Gefühl von Gefahr’, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 22 November, p. 38

Wilson, Michael, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, March, p. 314

‘Venezianische Geographie’, Der Spiegel, May

Jahn, Wolf, ‘Mehr Fragen als Antworten’, o.T., June

Mummenhoff, Julia, ‘Die Graue Grenze’, Szene Hamburg, July p. 93

Medina, Cuahtemoc, ‘Reflexividad sin reflexion’, Reforma, 25 October

Dunne, Aidan, ‘Beauty Out of the Blue’, The Irish Times, 25 October Leen, Catherine, ‘Willie Doherty: Empty’, The Sunday Times, 22 October McKeith, Eimear, ‘ “Empty” ’ feeling reveals Doherty’s rich mind’, Sunday Tribune, 22 October

Connolly, Maeve, ‘In Conversation: Experience and Alterity at the 51st Venice Biennale’, Contemporary, London, No. 74, June, pp. 22–24 Hontoria, Javier, ‘Willie Doherty’, El Cultural, El Mundo magazine, 10 November, p. 35 Julien, Issac, ‘Film Best of 2005: Issac Julien’, Artforum, December, p. 61 Martín, Alberto, ‘Memoria y devastación’, El País, 3 December Molina, Óscar Alonso, ‘De un País en Llamas’, ABC – ABC de las Artes y las Letras, 19 November Quin, John, ‘Dundee Contemporary Arts / Somewhere Everywhere Nowhere’, Contemporary, No. 73, pp. 62–63 Rubira, Sergio, ‘Willie Doherty’, Exit Express, December–January, pp. 20–21

Burrows, Wayne, ‘Focus on distrust’, Metro, Derby, 8 March, p. 23 Spinelli, Claudia, ‘Schreck, lass bloss nicht nach!’, Weltwoche, Zürich, No. 3, 20 January, pp. 80–81 2004

Bachofen, Katrin, ‘Galerie Peter Kilchmann’, Handels Zeitung, Zurich, No. 4, 21 January, p. 31

‘Derry heir’, Irish Sunday Times, 20 October 2001

2003 Dunne, Aidan, ‘International Reviews’, ARTnews, June, p. 128

Gregos, Katerina, ‘New York Now’, Contemporary Visual Arts, Summer, pp. 52–56

Schreiber, Anne, ‘Archive des Terrors’, Artnet magazine, December 14, www.artnet.de/magazine.news/ shreiber/schreiber12-14-05. asp?print=1

Gibbons, Fiachra, ‘But the Real Shock is….The Essex Vases’, The Guardian, 29 October, p. 3 Kastner, Jeffrey, ‘Faith Based Initiative’, Artforum, September, p. 96

Schmerler, Sarah, ‘Gallery Beat: New York’, Art on Paper, May–June, pp. 92–93

Sussman, Elisabeth, ‘Candide Cameras’, Artforum, September, pp. 261–263

‘Reviews’, Modern Painters, July, pp. 120, 121

‘Voice Choices: Willie Doherty’, Village Voice, February 14–20, p. 89

Searle, Adrian, ‘States of Decay’, The Guardian, 29 October, pp. 12–14

2000

Vetrocq, Marcia E, ‘Venice Biennale: Be Careful What You Wish For’, Art in America, September, pp. 109–119 Zolghadr, Tirdad, ‘Venice Biennale 2005’, Frieze, September, pp. 98–101 Aletti, Vince, ‘Art: Show World’, Village Voice, 10–16 March, p. C91 Leffingwell, Edward, ‘Willie Doherty at Alexander and Bonin’, Art in America, October, pp. 151–152 ‘The Thug’s Penetrating Stare’, Gay City News, 25–31 March, pp. 21, 31

Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, February, p. 164

Rogger, André, ‘Mit matschigen Äpfeln, Goya und Pitbullterriern’, Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, 9 December, p. 57

Schneider, Peter, ‘Fremd in der Stadt’, züritipp, 15 December, p. 73

‘Turner at 20’, Tate (Arts and Culture), London, November / December, pp. 46–53

Humphries, Jane, Circa, Winter 2000

‘Willie Doherty: Interview with Morgan Falconer’, Contemporary, London, September, pp. 30–33

Dunne, Aidan, The Irish Times, 27 September Kissick, John, ‘Feelin’ Mighty Real, (I think): The 1999 / 2000 Carnegie International’, New Art Examiner, March

2002

Siegel, Katy, ‘1999 Carnegie International’, Artforum, January, pp. 105–106

Wilson, Michael, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, May, p. 209

Buck, Louisa, ‘Remembering Bloody Sunday—and all the rest’, The Art Newspaper, February, p. 18

‘Very New Art 2000: Willie Doherty’, Bijutsu Techo, Tokyo, January, pp. 108–109

Lunn, Felicity, ‘Zurich’, Contemporary, No. 61, March, p. 23

Downey, Anthony, ‘Willie Doherty’, Contemporary, April, p. 112

Schneider, Peter, ‘Galerie Peter Kilchmann’, Züritipp, Tages Anzeiger, Zurich, No. 09 / 04, 26 February, p. 52

Frankel, David, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, September, p. 93

‘Willie Doherty: Extracts from a File’, In Dublin, 21 September– 4 October

‘Willie Doherty: Non-specific Threat’, Exit Express, April, p. 28

Muscionico, Daniele, ‘Kennzeichen: Angst’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, No. 37, 14 / 15 February, p.52 Schmitz, Edgar, ‘Turner Prize 2003’, Kunstforum, No. 168, January / February, pp. 372–373

1999

Lavoie, Vincent, ‘L’image-événement: Représentations de la terreur dans l’oevre de Willie Doherty et de Gerhard Richter’, Parachute, January–March, pp. 21–27 Linehan, Joe, ‘Willie Doherty: The Press invented a fable…’, Third Text, Autumn, pp. 108–110 Mac Giolla Léith, Caoimhín, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artforum, February, pp. 106–107 Patrick, Keith, ‘Dark Stains: Film Noir Elements in the work of Willie Doherty’, Contemporary Visual Arts, Summer, pp. 68–69 1998 ‘Artist of the Month: Willie Doherty’, Tatler, September, p. 73 Clark, Robert, ‘Bright Sparks’, The Guardian, 19 September ‘Arts in Brief’, The Chronicle, Wirral / Chester , 21 August Cripps, Rebecca, ‘Mixed Messages’, Sainsbury’s “The Magazine”, August, p. 19 Dunne, Aidan, ‘A troubled landscape’, The Irish Times, 9 September, Arts, p. 13 Handley, Malcolm, ‘The Terrible Beauty that is N Ireland’, Daily Post, 31 August, p. 12 Hill, Ian, ‘Taste of Ulster for SoHo, New York’, Ulster Newsletter, 14 September

‘Willie Doherty: Extracts from a File’, The Sunday Times, 24 September

Hill, Ian, ‘Expanding visual arts create major gallery demand’, Ulster Newsletter, 28 December

Suchin, Peter, ‘Willie Doherty’, Frieze, April, pp. 99–100

Holg, Garrett, ‘Willie Doherty: The Renaissance Society’, ARTnews, Summer, pp. 161–62

Isé, Claudine, ‘Cityscapes Through a Dark Lens’, The Los Angeles Times, 9 April

‘Willie Doherty: False Memory’, Art on Paper, November, p. 36

Johnson, Ken, ‘Willie Doherty’, The New York Times, 21 May, p. 31

Kyriacou, Sotiris, ‘Previews’, Contemporary, October, p. 13 Smyth, Cherry, ‘Willie Doherty’, Art Monthly, March, pp. 30–31

275

Campbell-Johnson, Rachel, ‘Around the Galleries: London and Liverpool’, The Times, 8 September Lourie, Francesca, ‘Willie Doherty – Somewhere Else’, Bigmouth, October

Forrest, Jason A., ‘Finding meaning in everyday objects’, The Journal / The Atlanta Constitution, 28 November, p. Q2

Lubbock, Tom, ‘Towards a perfect monotony’, The Tuesday Review, 1 September, Arts, p. 10

Gibbs, Michael, ‘ID – An international survey on the notion of identity in contemporary art’, Art Monthly, February, pp. 34–36

Magnan, Kathleen, ‘Border Incident’, World Art, Spring, pp. 37–41

Herbert, Martin, ‘Willie Doherty’, Time Out London, 23–30 July

Riley, Joe, ‘Images of War’, Liverpool Echo, 3 September

Ireson, Ally, ‘Must See: Same Old Story’, D>tour, London, July

Shreef, Zaria, ‘Beauty and Cruelty’, The Big Issue, 14–20 September, p. 29

Irish Post, 12 July

Sumpter, Helen, ‘Willie Doherty: Somewhere Else’, The Big Issue, 24 August ‘Willie Doherty’s visions of Northern Ireland’, The Art Newspaper, September, p. 30 Zellen, Jody, ‘Willie Doherty’, Art Press, Paris , June, pp. 64–65 1997 Archer, Michael, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Artforum, November, p. 126 Bonami, Francesco, ‘No Place (Like Home)’, Flash Art, Summer, p. 131 Cerrato, Guiseppe, ‘Irischer KunstReporter’, Schweitzer Illustriert, 8 September, p. 65 (in German) Clancy, Luke, ‘Images of Conflict: Willie Doherty’, The Irish Times, Dublin, 8 March Craddock, Sacha, The Times, London, 29 July Cubitt, Sean, ‘Willie Doherty’, Art Monthly, July–August Dunne, Aidan, ‘Willie Doherty’, The Sunday Tribune, Dublin, 2 March

Licata, Elizabeth, ‘Being in Time: The Emergence of Video Projection’, ARTnews, February, p. 123 Lorés, Maite, ‘Willie Doherty: Same Old Story’, Contemporary Visual Arts, Autumn, pp. 40–47 Kurjakovic, Daniel, ‘Willie Doherty in der Galerie Peter Kilchmann’, Bulletin, September, p. 43 Mac Namara, Aoife, ‘The Only Good one is a Dead One: The Art of Willie Doherty’, Fuse, Toronto, August, pp. 12–23 Mac Namara, Aoife, ‘Willie Doherty: Art Gallery of Ontario’, Parachute, Montréal, Summer, pp. 53–54 Masterson, Piers, ‘Willie Doherty’, Creative Camera, August / September Searle, Adrian, ‘Talk is Cheap’, The Guardian, 26 July Slyce, John, ‘Willie Doherty’, What’s On, London, July Slyce, John, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Flash Art, November– December, p. 114 Updike, Robin, ‘Sketchbook’, Seattle Times, 14 July ‘Willie Doherty’, The Guardian, 22 July, p. 10

1996 Adeyemi, Ester, ‘NordirlandKonflikt in Kunsthalle’, Thurgauer Tagblatt, 8 August (in German, published nationally) Becher, Jochen, ‘Dieses leere, verwüstete Land’, Die Tageszeitung, 7 August, p. 12 (in German, published nationally)

Tobler, Konrad, ‘ Dunkel Sperren verdüstern Nordirlands Zukunft’, Berner Zeitung, 7 July, (in German, published nationally) Volk, Gregory, ‘Willie Doherty – Alexander and Bonin’, ARTnews, April Wilson, Claire, ‘Irish Eyes’, Art & Antiques, Summer

Frankel, David, ‘Willie Doherty – Alexander and Bonin’, Artforum, May, p. 100

Vachtova, Ludmila, ‘Im Dunkeln’, Neue Bildende Kunst, No. 5, p. 111

Green, David, ‘Willie Doherty.

Thwarted Vision’, Portfolio, December

1995

Heartney, Eleanor, ‘Willie Doherty at Alexander and Bonin’, Art in America, September, p. 113

Dunne, Aidan, ‘Turner also-ran is 15,000 favourite’, The Tribune Magazine, London, 26 February, Arts, p. 29

Hand, Brian, ‘Swerved in Naught’, Circa Art Magazine, Dublin, Summer, p. 22 Higgins, Judith, ‘Report from Ireland – Art at the Edge (Part II)’, Art in America, April Jardas, Margaret, ‘Wie Willie Doherty Konfusion inszeniert’, Basler Zeitung, 14 August, (in German, published nationally)

Baqué, Dominique, ‘Menaces’, Art Press, Paris, June

Giuliano, Charles, ‘Fresh Paint’, The Improper Bostonian, August 30– 12 September Kastner, Jeffrey, ‘Ten Artists to Watch Wordwide: Willie Doherty, Northern Ireland’, ARTnews, January, p. 40 Mac Giolla Leith, Caoimhin, ‘Willie Doherty, Kerlin’, Flash Art, May / June

Lanzinger, Pia, ‘Willie Doherty: In The Dark. Projected Works’, Camera Austria International, No. 56

Maul, Tim, ‘Willie Doherty’ (interview), Journal of Contemporary Art, 7.2, pp. 18–27

Maurer, Simon, ‘Die Sprache des Krieges dekonstruieren’, Tages Anzeiger, 20 July, p. 48

Rowlands, Penelope, ‘Willie Doherty: Jennifer Flay’, ARTnews, Summer, p. 135

Maurer, Simon, ‘Willie Doherty’, Artscribe, October–November, p. 70 (in German)

1994

Oberholzer, Niklaus, ‘Fahrt durchs nächtlichte Dunkelan die Grenzen’, Luzerner Zeitung, 20 July, (in German, published nationally)

Archer, Michael, ‘Im Nachhinein Tracey Emin und andere’, Texte zur Kunst, March Blazwick, Iwona, ‘Interview with Willie Doherty’, Art Monthly, December / January, pp. 3–7

Cameron, Dan, ‘Social Studies’, Art & Auction, November 1994 Cork, Richard, ‘Muting the howls of the Philistines’, The Times, London, 23 July Faure Walker, Caryn, ‘Willie Doherty: Arnolfini, Bristol, and Matt’s Gallery, London’, Portfolio, No. 19 Irvine, Jaki, ‘The Only Good One is a Dead One’, Third Text, Spring

1993

Time Out London, 17–19 October

Jennings, Rose, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Time Out, 8–15 December

‘They’re all the Same’, a project for Frieze, Issue 2 1988

1992 La Recherche Photographique, 13, Autumn McWilliams, Martha, ‘Terror to Scale’, New Art Examiner, April

Coppock, Christopher, ‘Colouring the Black and White’, Circa Art Magazine, Dublin, June / July Creative Camera, London, December 1987

Kastner, Jeffrey, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Frieze, January / February

1991 O Conchúir, le Pádraig, ‘Ballaí Doire’, The Irish World, 22 February (in Irish)

Roberts, John, ‘Directions Out’, Artscribe International, September / October, pp. 73–74

Morgan, Stuart, ‘The Spine: de Appel, Amsterdam’, Frieze, May / June

Phillipi, Desa, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Artforum, January

1986

Scanlan, Patricia, ‘Outer Space’, Variant, 10, Winter

Brian McAvera, ‘Redemption!’, The Irish News, 3 September

Sharkey, Sabina, ‘City Sites: Willie Doherty, Unknown Depths’, Creative Camera, 306, p. 49

McCrum, ‘Linking Text and Image’, The Sunday Tribune, 26 January

Pepper, Jens, ‘Matt’s Gallery in Londoner East End’, Neue Bildende Kunst, February / March Renton, Andrew, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Flash Art, February Schaffner, Ingrid, ‘Willie Doherty, Grey Art Gallery’, Artforum, December Smith, Caroline, ‘Doherty’, What’s On, 19–26 January

‘Same Difference’, Drier, Deborah, a project by Willie Doherty for Artforum, May 1990

Smith, Caroline, ‘Northern Exposure’, Irish Post, 19 March

Dickson, Malcolm, ‘Permanent curfews’, The List, Scotland, 29 June–12 July, p. 69

Smith, Roberta, ‘Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum and Doris Salcedo’, The New York Times, 11 November

Hutchinson, John, ‘An Acute Angle on Ireland’, The Sunday Independent, 10 June

Smith, Roberta, ‘Bluntly, the Tragedy of “the Troubles” ’, The New York Times, 9 September

Irvine, Jaki, ‘Willie Doherty’, Circa Art Magazine, Dublin, September / October, pp. 37–38

‘Willie Doherty’, The New Yorker

Jennings, Rose, ‘Same Difference: Matt’s Gallery’, City Limits, London, 18–25 October

‘Willie Doherty / Mona Hatoum / Doris Salcedo’, Village Voice – Voice Choices, 8 November, p. 7

Lillington, David, ‘Willie Doherty: Matt’s Gallery’, Time Out London, 17–24 October, p. 31

277

Artist’s Biography

Authors’ Biographies

Willie Doherty was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1959. He lives in County Donegal and continues to work in Derry. Since the early 1990s, he has had numerous international solo exhibitions, including the Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich; Kunstverein Hamburg; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois. In 2007, he represented Northern Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. His work has been presented in prestigious international group exhibitions, including: dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); 51st Venice Biennale, Venice (2005); 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2003); 25th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2002); and Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999).

He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice (in 1994 and 2003), and was awarded a DAAD residency, Berlin, in 1999. He joined the University of Ulster in 1998 where he has been Professor of Video Art since 2005.

Jean Fisher studied both Zoology and Fine Art, subsequently becoming a freelance writer on contemporary art and colonial legacies. She is a former editor of Third Text and editor of the anthologies Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (London: Kala Press, 1994), Re-verberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans / Cultural Practices (Amsterdam: Idea Books, 2000) and co-editor with the Cuban critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera, Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). A selection of her writings was published as Vampire in the Text (London: Iniva, 2003). She is Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University in London.

Susan McKay is an author whose books include Bear in Mind These Dead (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 2007) and Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2000).

She has worked for many years as a journalist and has won several major awards for her work on the Northern conflict and on social issues.

Colm Tóibín’s novels include The Master (London: Picador, 2004) and Brooklyn (London: Viking, 2009), and his non-fiction work includes Homage to Barcelona (London: Simon & Schuster, 1990) and Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (London: Vintage, 1994).

His work has been translated into thirty languages. He is a member of Aosdana, Dublin and the Royal Society of Literature, London, and he is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

Acknowledgements

Matt’s Gallery and Nerve Centre wish to thank UK City of Culture 2013, The Culture Company, The British Council, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, DCAL, Derry City Council, EU Culture Fund; the institutions who have so generously loaned their works to this exhibition: Tate, London, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, The Arts Council Collection, London and National Museums Northern Ireland; and the following individuals who in various ways have helped to bring this exhibition and publication together: Sue MacDiarmid; Tony Waddingham, Jean Fisher, Colm Tóibín, Susan McKay and Rosalind Horne; Caroline Widmer; Paul Martin, Donal Coyle and Michael McFaul.

The artist wishes to thank: Carolyn Alexander, Ted Bonin and Rebecca Brickman, Alexander and Bonin, New York; Darragh Hogan, David Fitzgerald, John Kennedy and Anne Morgan, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Peter Kilchmann, Annemarie Reichen and Rebecka Domig, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid; Judith Carlton and Holly Slingsby, Matt’s Gallery, London; John Peto, Sharon Concannon, David Lewis and Karen Friel, Nerve Centre, Derry; Esteban Mauchi, Laumont Photographics; Shona McCarthy, Graeme Farrow and Martin Melarkey, The Culture Company; Brendan McMenamin, Colette Norwood, Caroline Douglas, Anne Stewart, Seamus Mc Garvey, Conor Hammond, Stephen Rea, Adrian Dunbar, John Martin, Justine Scoltock, Kathryn Klassnik; Sue MacDiarmid for her invaluable assistance; Tony Waddingham for his enthusiastic collaboration; Robin Klassnik and Pearse Moore for their unwavering support and dedication to this project; Angela Carlin for her love and patience; Joanna, Tomas, Eabha and Michael.

279

Colophon

Published by Matt’s Gallery, London and Nerve Centre, Derry to coincide with the exhibition Willie Doherty: UNSEEN Exhibition dates: City Factory Gallery, Derry, 27 September 2013 – 4 January 2014 De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, 2014 Copyright © Willie Doherty, Matt’s Gallery, London and Nerve Centre, Derry 2013 Unless otherwise indicated, all works © Willie Doherty Texts © The Authors ‘Seeing Beyond the Pale, The Photographic Works of Willie Doherty’ by Jean Fisher (pp. 18–28) was originally published in the exhibition catalogue Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths, Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 1990.

Matt’s Gallery Staff Director: Robin Klassnik Assistant Director: Judith Carlton Gallery Manager Sales & Artist Representation: Holly Slingsby Stanley Picker Trainee: Beth Bramich Archivists: Matilda Strang, Carolyn Thompson Bookkeeper: Sophie Luard Matt’s Gallery Board of Trustees Jananne Al-Ani, Lucy Byatt, Robin Klassnik, Henry Meyric-Hughes, Frederique Pierre-Pierre, Magnus af Petersens, Elizabeth Price, Christopher Turner (Chair), Rachel Withers Matt’s Gallery is funded by Arts Council England Matt’s Gallery is a non-profit organisation. It is a Friendly Society registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965.

Registration No. 27797 r Matt’s Gallery 42–44 Copperfield Road London e3 4rr t +44 (0) 208 9831771 f +44 (0) 208 9831435 info@mattsgallery.org www.mattsgallery.org

Nerve Centre Staff Chief Executive: Pearse Moore Director of Education: John Peto Director of Communications: David Lewis Online and PR Staff: Joe Carlin, Karen Friel, Natasha Deeney Gallery Support Staff: Richard Taylor, Gavin Duffy Admin Staff: Michael McCrory, Paul Halpenny, Lynn Wallace Receptionist: Eamon Phillips Nerve Centre Board of Directors Adrianne Brown, Ross Graham, Michael Hamlyn, Sean Hannigan, Tess Maginess (Chair), Andrew McAfee, John McGowan Nerve Centre is a company registered in Northern Ireland and recognised by the Inland Revenue as a charity: xr20210 Nerve Centre 7–8 Magazine Street Derry Northern Ireland bt48 6hj t +44 (0) 2871 260562 f +44 (0) 2871 371738 info@nervecentre.org www.nervecentre.org

Edited by Rosalind Horne Designed by Tony Waddingham 1500 copies printed on Condat Silk 170 g/m2 paper by Cassochrome, Belgium isbn: 978-0-907623-92-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval) without permission from the author and publisher.

Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street Manchester m1 5nh www.cornerhouse.org This publication has been generously supported by: The British Council; UK City of Culture 2013; EU Culture Fund with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union; Derry City Council; Nerve Centre, Derry and Matt’s Gallery, London.

Willie Doherty is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London; Alexander and Bonin, New York; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich and Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid.

U N S E E N