Willie DohertyHOME

HOME (2016) is the title of the latest video installation by Willie Doherty, participant in documenta (2012) and Ireland’s representative at the Venice Biennale (2007). Willie Doherty has always reflected in subtle ways on the precarious political situation in Northern Ireland, focusing throughout on individual states of mind that oscillate between security and threat, vulnerability and inviolability – just as he now, in the same overarching manner, also enquires into the context of migration and social belonging. HOME revolves around the subject of refugees, while the video works “The Amnesiac” (2014) and “Buried” (2009) combine aspects of memory with the desire for individual inviolability. The installation “Remains” (2013), by contrast, plays with the idea of collective memory by turning its attention to the practice of so-called kneecapping cultivated by three generations of the IRA, in which actual or supposed dissenters or traitors were punished with a shot in one of the kneecaps. The videos, which strongly stimulate the imagination, are always accompanied in terms of content by mostly documentary photographs. Between the two poles of authenticity and fiction, Willie Doherty explores the conditions of the filmic and plays skilfully with the genres of the action film, the auteur film and the documentary. His pictorial technique thereby resembles a crime narrative: it heightens the indistinguishability between concrete threat and the fear of the indeterminate; narrative structures and their possible interpretations remain largely open. Willie Doherty’s photographs and videos thus invite an open engagement with images that we would otherwise encounter only with the utmost mistrust.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Städtische Galerie Esslingen, 14/2 – 24/4/2016