SILENCE / ENCLAVE
PHOTOGRAPHS, 1985-2012 & 1987-2012
WILLIE DOHERTY (UK)
Willie Doherty’s SILENCE, After a Kneecapping and ENCLAVE, Dividing Wall were originally taken in the 1980s, but were not exhibited by the artist until 2012, after the artist returned to a number of undeveloped negatives in his archive. The photographs are both black and white fibre photographs mounted on aluminium. Alongside a number of other previously unseen images taken between 1985 and 1993, the works were shown in an exhibition at Kerlin Gallery in 2012 titled Lapse. The works in this series, including these two, tend to capture ghostly terrains in and around Willie’s native Derry. Roads, car parks and passageways take on a sense of foreboding — largely devoid of people and activity, they are sometimes the sites of horrific instances of sectarian violence, but appear eerily quiet in these images.
In the era that these photographs were taken, Willie achieved widespread critical acclaim for his photo/text works — artworks using photographs similar to these, blown up to large-format and overlaid with text. Upon revisiting the photographs in 2012, however, Willie chose to leave the images as they were. Instead, only the works’ titles pin down their locations, or hint towards any violent history that may have happened at the sites. Revising the photographs almost thirty years on, Willie draws our attention to how our understanding—— Willie Doherty’s SILENCE, After a Kneecapping and ENCLAVE, Dividing Wall were originally taken in the 1980s, but were not exhibited by the artist until 2012, after the artist returned to a number of undeveloped negatives in his archive. The photographs are both black and white fibre photographs mounted on aluminium. Alongside a number of other previously unseen images taken between 1985 and 1993, the works were shown in an exhibition at Kerlin Gallery in 2012 titled Lapse. The works in this series, including these two, tend to capture ghostly terrains in and around Willie’s native Derry. Roads, car parks and passageways take on a sense of foreboding — largely devoid of people and activity, they are sometimes the sites of horrific instances of sectarian violence, but appear eerily quiet in these images.
In the era that these photographs were taken, Willie achieved widespread critical acclaim for his photo/text works — artworks using photographs similar to these, blown up to large-format and overlaid with text. Upon revisiting the photographs in 2012, however, Willie chose to leave the images as they were. Instead, only the works’ titles pin down their locations, or hint towards any violent history that may have happened at the sites. Revising the photographs almost thirty years on, Willie draws our attention to how our understanding of events has changed in the passing of time.
BIO:
Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art, film and photography. At once highly seductive and visually disorientating, Willie’s artworks tend to begin as responses to specific terrains and evolve as complex reflections on how we look at such locations — or on what stories might be told about their hidden histories. The primary point of geographical reference for Willie during the three decades of his remarkable career has been his native city of Derry, a city famously defined and demarcated according to the traumatic divisions of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. From early conceptual photo-text works, to diptych and serial works in film and photography that set contradictory points of view against each other, Willie has returned again and again to Derry as source and subject, revisiting and re-viewing familiar places from alternative positions.