Ghost Walk II

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Work & Pensions, Caxton House, Tothill Street

Ghost Walk II and Ghost Walk III by Willie Doherty are related to two key video works by the artist that were shown at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2009. The photographs, which Doherty produced in a later period, were shot in Derry and along the border outside the city. Writing on this series of work, the Irish art critic and lecturer, Declan Long observed:

For almost four decades, the art of Willie Doherty has been profoundly affected by border landscapes, border atmospheres, border experiences — in Ireland and beyond. Again and again, Doherty has haunted such spaces, wandering along country roads or lingering at suburban margins, exploring locations where, visibly or invisibly, one state connects with  another. (Or, put differently: the points where one state is separated from another.) He has been compelled to visit and revisit peripheral zones, condemned to reckon repeatedly with their fraught histories and disrupted geographies.'  

(Declan Long, Where are we now? from Willie Doherty, Where/Dove published to accompany the artist's 2021 exhibition at Fondazione Modena, Milan and Ulster Museum, Belfast).

Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art, film and photography. His works typically begin as responses to his native city of Derry, and the impact and legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. They are complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on the stories that might be told about their hidden histories. From early conceptual photo-text works – focusing on the impossibility of establishing any ‘objective’ perspective on this territory – to serial works in film and photography that set contradictory points of view against each other, Doherty reviews familiar places from alternative positions. Doherty has exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums, including the CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Museum De Pont, Tilburg; IMMA, Dublin; SMK, Copenhagen; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate, London; Modern Art Oxford; Dallas Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstverein München; Kunstverein Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. He was nominated twice for the Turner Prize and has participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta, Manifesta, the Carnegie International, and the Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul Biennales.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

aluminium, pigment print

Artist

Willie Doherty (1959 - )

Title

Ghost Walk II

Edition

Number 3 in an edition of 3

Date

2016

Medium

pigment print

Dimensions

height: 106.6 cm; width: 159.8 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Kerlin Gallery as part of the Northern Ireland Centenary, March 2021

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2021

GAC number

18989