Willie Doherty: Disturbance

About

Twice Turner Prize nominated artist Willie Doherty is renowned for his video installations and photographs. Disturbance surveys his works from the mid 1980s to today. The exhibition includes his most recent video work, Ancient Ground, shot last year on the peat bogs of County Donegal. Doherty's work begins with the land; showing it as contested and conflicted, exploring its relationship to memory and subjectivity. His work is rooted in the politics and topography of his native Derry. However, his practice transcends the specifics of any particular context, as this exhibition reveals. The current work shifts between the urban and the rural. What the terrain has witnessed is patiently tracked down and his discoveries, the scars of human activity on the land, are yielded up and captured on camera. Doherty's engagement with the land is very particular. His surveillance of territory searches for evidence of its relationship with social and political concerns. The insistent repetition of text and circularity of imagery heighten that sense of entrapment: who is the protagonist, who is the victim? This exhibition is presented in association with Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.