Willie Doherty was born in 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland. He studied at the University of Ulster, formerly known as Ulster Polytechnic from 1978 to 1981. He lives in Donegal, Ireland. Willie Doherty is known for his photography and video works. Since 1985, Willie Doherty has concentrated his attention on the conflict in Northern Ireland and mainly on the border region of Derry. Doherty’s works are of immense consistency and bound together by at least one main subject: the urban landscape of Northern Ireland. Doherty states that this landscape is not at all abstract or anonymous because of its political, historical and social inscriptions and meanings. Through large-scale photographs and videos, Willie Doherty is able to create a comprehensive analysis of the character and power of political information. In his work Willie Doherty pays attention to the way that images spread through mass media alter our views on events and other people, especially in the construction of terms of social or national identities. In a sense, Willie Doherty’s artistic practice takes the role of a critical and dialectical mirror of the codifications in newspaper reportages, TV documentaries and promotional advertisings in tourist leaflets, which pick up the aesthetics of the picturesque and the romantic sublime. Most of the time, Willie Doherty deviates the topics and subjects from his personal local experience: the socio-political and historical circumstances of the city of Derry and its environment. Creating works abroad, during a DAAD-residency in Berlin, or for Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain, he has carried this acute historical awareness with him and it is with this approach that Willie Doherty recently engaged with Zurich, gathering visual impressions and observing historical attributes during several trips to the city. The rivers Sihl and Limmat play an important role, as does the continuing shift of the cityʼs periphery. An ambivalent play with reality and fiction informs the resulting movie Without Trace, in which the slowly panning camera follows the cityʼs streams, rivers and suburban developments. The doubted space of identity gets – in a considerable corpus of Willie’s work – created through seemingly featureless peripheral zones: the innominate road solely constructed to lead in and out of the city; the wastes on the outskirts of the urban realm, in itself neither totally rural nor urban, neither ‘nature’ nor ‘culture’, and where the difference between the two cannot be upheld.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
The Speed Museum, Louisville, US, 2011
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, US, 2009
Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, DE, 2007
Städtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE, 2007
Northern Ireland Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, IT, 2007
Selected Group Exhibitions
dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, DE, 2012
Manifesta 8, Murcia, ES, 2010
Museion, Bolzano, IT, 2008
MoMA PS1, New York, US, 2006
Castello di Rivoli, Turin, IT, 2005
Collections
Collezione la Gaia, Busca, IT
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, US
Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création LVMH, Paris, FR
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE
Katherine & Keith L. Sachs Art Foundation, Rydal, US
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, US
Sammlung Goetz, Munich, DE
Städtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, Munich, DE
Tate Modern, London, UK
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
Villa Merkel/Bahnwärter Haus, Esslingen am Neckar, DE