Willie Doherty
Stories
through January 6, 2008
Opening September 28 , 7 pm
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich
Luisenstraße 3
80333 München
phone: +49-89-233 320-00
fax: +49-89-233 320-03
Tuesday to Sunday 10 am – 6 pm
e-mail: lenbachhaus@muenchen.de
www.lenbachhaus.de
Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1959, Willie Doherty is one of the best-known artists of his generation and has been chosen to represent his home country at the Venice Biennale this year. In order to do justice to the evolution of this impressive oeuvre, the Hamburg Kunstverein and the Lenbachhaus Munich have developed two different, complementary exhibitions that give a representative showing of the slide installations and videos from the start of Doherty’s career in the early 1990s to the present day.
In his (often large-scale) single- and multi-channel videos, Willie Doherty offers political and aesthetic images of Ireland that challenge widespread misconceptions of pristine natural landscapes as well as biased coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict. The voice over in certain works, for instance, switches identity between offender and victim. Doherty’s concern is not so much to tie down events and interpretations as to pinpoint archetypal features of the conflict. The traces of conflict that the videos capture–for instance deserted and wrecked buildings, or roadblocks–are also always viewed ambivalently, both as provocation for and as the consequence of actions. This shifting of perspectives and roles is in keeping with the reception that Doherty’s often dualistically conceived works invite: perception of them is optimal when one moves around the exhibition space, directing attention at one of two screens then at the other.
Doherty’s works have a remarkable ability to reach out beyond the specifically Northern Irish conflict and deal at a sophisticated level with general topics such as the surveillance of public space, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and national and religious conflicts. While Doherty’s stylistic devices are wide-ranging, all of his works share a high degree of suggestive visual invention and also the fascinating ambivalence of what at first sight appears to be unambiguous. A seemingly ominous figure, such as the man with shaved head in Non-Specific Threat (2004), for instance, whom the camera circles to the accompaniment of a voiceover, is both active and reactive, fictional and real, past and future. His words invoke situations ranging from menace to intimacy. The man could be a participant in the Northern Ireland conflict, or he could also be a plain human being–a worker, a student, a sportsman.
It is precisely this productive ambiguity that implicates the viewer at a level that is not only emotional but also intellectual, and reveals that those fears of possible violence and the paranoiac projections vis-á-vis the supposedly strange and unfamiliar are by no means confined to Northern Ireland.
The exhibition received financial support from Culture Ireland and University of Ulster
Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior and Matthias Mühling
The catalogue is published by Hatje Cantz with essays by Francis McKee and Matthias Mühling, an interview with the artist by Yilmaz Dziewior, and a videography documenting the filmic works from
1990-2007.
Artist Talk
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 6 pm
Guided tours from experts
Matthias Mühling, curator of the exhibition
Septemer 29, 2007, 4 pm
October 4, 2007, 4 pm
December 13, 2007, 4 pm
Marcus Coelen, Institut für romanische Philologie
November 8, 2007, 4 pm
Petra Löffler, Institut für Medien-, Informations- und Kulturwissenschaft, Universität Regensburg
November 22, 2007, 4 pm
filmscreening
November 1, 2007, 7 pm
Filmmuseum im Münchner Stadtmuseum, St.-Jakobs-Platz 1, 80331 München
Elephant (UK 1989, 35 min.) Alan Clarke
Bloody Sunday (UK, Ireland 2002, 107 min.) Paul Greengrass
