Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty
Born 1959, Derry, Northern Ireland
Lives and works in Derry

Somewhere Else employs the visual language of documentary film, video surveillance, and mass-media news photography to investigate psychological and political conflict in Northern Ireland. Doherty uses such techniques to draw attention to the ways in which the media constructs and influences our perception of places, people, and events. His film techniques are brought to bear on borderlands in his immediate environs: bucolic landscapes scarred by the remnants of military demarcations, outskirts of corroded urban areas, the sea lapping at land’s edge. The installation of this four-part video projection is configured in such a way that the viewer cannot see the entire piece simultaneously from a single vantage point. This arrangement refers physically and metaphorically to the existence of multiple, and even antagonistic, viewpoints in Doherty’s native Derry.

Willie Doherty’s photographs and video installations have been shown extensively in group exhibitions throughout Europe since the early 1980s. These include NowHere, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, and Face à l’Histoire 1933-1996, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1996); no place (like home), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1997); and Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Art from the UK (Part II), Sammlung Goetz, Munich (1998). Solo exhibitions of Doherty’s work have been presented at Matt’s Gallery, London (1990); Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (1991); Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York Univer-sity (1993Ð94); Alexander and Bonin, New York, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthalle Bern, and Kunstverein München, Munich (1996); Berwick Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, and Le Magasin, Grenoble (1997-98); Tate Gallery Liverpool (1998); and Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1999).

Education
1981 Ulster Polytechnic, Belfast, B.A.

Selected Further Reading
Tate Gallery Liverpool, England. Willie Doherty: Somewhere Else (1998). Exhibition catalogue, texts by Camilla Jackson and Ian Hunt.

Firstsite, Colchester, England; Matt’s Gallery, London; and Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland. Willie Doherty: same old story (1997). Exhibition catalogue.

Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Willie Doherty: In the Dark. Projected Works (1996). Exhibition catalogue, texts by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Ulrich Loock.

Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, New York; Matt’s Gallery, London. Willie Doherty (1993). Exhibition catalogue, text by Dan Cameron.

Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Wales; Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland; Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, Scotland. Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths (1990). Exhibition catalogue, text by Jean Fisher.