Willie Doherty, Again and Again, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, CAM, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 November 2015 – 15 January 2016.
Focusing on key pieces from across the artists’ career, the publication travels backwards through time – from the acclaimed 2014 video piece The Amnesiac, right back to Doherty’s seminal photo/text works of the early 1990s.
As well as a large number of quality full-colour images, it features texts by art critic Declan Long and curator Isabel Carlos.
Again and Again is the title chosen by Willie Doherty for this exhibition, which we wanted to be anthological to allow the general public to experience a significant portion of his artistic production, including works from the early 1990s such as Same Difference (1990) and They’re All The Same (1991). Both make use of slide projections and explore the relationship between texts, where the idea of repetition or recurrence is already present, as can easily be deduced from their titles. Another recurrence is human presence. Faces: a woman in the first work and a man in the second. The question of the presence of the human figure became the common theme in our selection of the works, beginning with the video works involving single projection, which most closely resemble the classic format of moving images and cinema and are indirectly related to the installation format that Doherty also explores. In speaking of human presence, this does not necessarily mean that a human body appears in all of the works. Rather, there are traces of human presence in all of them: someone who passed by and left a plastic bag or a sleeping bag on top of a rock, the sudden shock of a rusted and weathered car bonnet in the middle of a green field, or the remains of a controlled burn. It is nature turning into a human body – anthropomorphised. Or is it the human body that surrenders to and buries itself in nature? This dichotomy permeates all of Doherty’s work.
The question of the presence of the human figure became the common theme in our selection of the works, beginning with the video works involving single projection, which most closely resemble the classic format of moving images and cinema and are indirectly related to the installation format that Doherty also explores. In speaking of human presence, this does not necessarily mean that a human body appears in all of the works. Rather, there are traces of human presence in all of them: someone who passed by and left a plastic bag or a sleeping bag on top of a rock, the sudden shock of a rusted and weathered car bonnet in the middle of a green field, or the remains of a controlled burn. It is nature turning into a human body – anthropomorphised. Or is it the human body that surrenders to and buries itself in nature? This dichotomy permeates all of Doherty’s work.
