Willie Doherty: HOME

The action docu-drama by Willie Doherty

HOME (2016) is the title of the latest video installation by Willie Doherty, Documenta participant (2012) and representative of Ireland at the Venice Biennale (2007). Willie Doherty has always subtly reflected on the precarious political situation in Northern Ireland, always focussing on individual sensitivities that oscillate between security and threat, vulnerability and integrity - just as he now questions the context of migration and social belonging in the same overarching form. HOME revolves around the refugee issue, while the video works "The Amnesiac" (2014) and "Buried" (2009) combine aspects of memory with the desire for individual integrity. The installation "Remains" (2013), on the other hand, plays with the idea of collective memory by focussing on the practice of so-called kneecapping cultivated by three IRA generations. Actual or perceived dissenters or traitors were punished by being shot in one of the kneecaps. The videos, which strongly stimulate the imagination, are always accompanied by mostly documentary photographs. Between the two poles of authenticity and fiction, Willie Doherty explores the conditions of the cinematic and skilfully plays with the genres of action, auteur and documentary film. His visual technique resembles a criminalistic narrative: it increases 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 therefore invite us to deal openly with images that we would otherwise only approach with extreme suspicion.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Municipal Galleries Esslingen, 14/2 - 24/4/2016