Willie Doherty: Without Trace

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstrasse, Zurich

It is a rare occasion that Willie Doherty has realized a body of work outside of Northern Ireland. In addition it is the very first time that he has focused so intently on snow, the presence of which receives an almost mystical connotation in his new film Without Trace (2013). A man disappears without trace in Zurich. The snow has made all traces disappear. Notebooks found in the man’s apartment reveal his thoughts and impression of isolation. The screening of the 13-minute video work (Ed. of 3) is accompanied by a series of 11 large color C-prints on aluminium, as Without Trace (Into Thin Air) (2013, 120 x 160 cm, framed, Ed. of 3). The photographs show a contemporary Zurich, acknowledging a temporality without being defined by it. The photographic works alone already tell stories of the tensions between massive architectures and unruly nature; scenes in which practically all traces of single persons have been erased. 

 

In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T.S. Eliot writes about the simultaneity of historical past and contemporary present in works of great art, naming it a “historical sense”. The author describes it as “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together […]”. It is this feeling, that of many stories that are happening instantaneously, swirling together and separating incessantly, that is present in the video and photographic works of Willie Doherty. Since the 1980s Willie Doherty’s work has been informed by the complex history of his hometown Derry and the conflicts between Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. Creating works abroad, during a DAAD-residency in Berlin, or for Manifesta 8 in Murcia, Spain, he has carried this acute historical aware-ness with him.

 

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 resulting works structure the collected findings in a new order and ascribe them a new significance. The rivers Sihl and Limmat play an important role, as does the continuing shift of the city’s periphery. An ambivalent play with reality and fiction informs Without Trace, in which the slowly panning camera follows the city’s streams, rivers and suburban developments. Willie Doherty guides the camera’s eye to capture the city’s movement and standstill, going beyond the clandestine outskirts of Zurich and the margins of the city.