Willie Doherty Unseen

UNSEEN will be a major exhibition of photographic and video works by Willie Doherty. Since 1985 he has recorded the way in which the city has been shaped and altered in response to unfolding political events as he explored its streets through the simple acts of walking and looking.

Willie Doherty was born in 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland. In 1994 and 2003, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

The title of the exhibition, UNSEEN, refers to Doherty’s self- conscious method of using the camera in a context where it was imperative for him to avoid undue attention and to minimize the risk of being mistaken for a photojournalist or a tourist.

UNSEEN will present key photographic works from throughout Doherty’s career and will examine how the artist evolved the use of image and text in his early black and white works, 1985-92, to engage with the complexities of representing a contested landscape.

As part of this unique exhibition, Willie Doherty will produce a new group of photographs of Derry in 2013. UNSEEN will provide a unique opportunity to appraise the photographic and video work of Willie Doherty in the context where it was produced. The work will be subjected to a different scrutiny, one that has been shaped by an understanding of how things have turned out but is subject to the fallibility of human memory and like photography itself, cannot be relied upon to provide a full account of what happened.

UNSEEN will also showcase a number of Doherty’s most important video installations that make use of some of Derry’s best-known and more hidden places as locations for his narratives. The exhibition will include Re-Run, 2002, for which Doherty was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2003, Non-Specific Threat, 2004 which was shown to critical acclaim at the Venice Biennale, 2005 and Ghost Story, 2007, which was produced for the Venice Biennale in 2007 which will be shown for the first time in Derry.

Willie Doherty will also create a new film work as part of the exhibition, which will be accompanied by the production of a catalogue with new essays.