Bullet holes, blocked roads, abandoned cars: the detritus of violence. Even those who have never heard of the Derry based artist Willie Doherty will find False Memory, his forthcoming exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, replete with images that are disturbingly familiar. In what is effectively a mid-career retrospective and the largest Irish exhibition of his work to date, Doherty convincingly displays his ability to comment on thirty years of conflict without sacrificing aesthetic principles, resorting to sensationalism, or succumbing to cliché.
Curated by Brenda McParland, Head of Exhibition at IMMA, and accompanied by an impressive catalogue with contributions from Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the show follows Doherty’s career from early black and white photographs such as Mesh (1986) and The Walls (1987), to the video installation Re-Run, first shown as Britain’s contribution to the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale.
Although Doherty, born in Derry’s resolutely nationalist community in 1959, seems an unlikely candidate to represent Britain, this is just the latest addition to a CV that reads like a blueprint for diplomacy. Representing Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale, nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, and short-listed for the Glen Dimplex Award in the same year, Doherty has somehow managed to remain neutral in a society where every syllable is a tribal marking. The tactics he uses to achieve such impartiality lie at the very core of his art and are founded on the recognition of not only the limitations of the photographic medium, but also the fallibility of the human gaze.
Appropriating familiar images and texts that constant media play has imbued with iconic status, Doherty uses subtle processes of juxtaposition and decontextualisation to question perceived truths, reveal prejudices and interrogate the very notion of communication in the context of entrenched social and political conflict.
Nowhere are these techniques put to better use than in his controversial slide installation, Same Difference (1990): the face of a woman, photographed from a T.V. broadcast following her arrest for suspected terrorist activities, is projected onto opposing walls of a darkened space. Across her features flash words that reveal the seemingly irreconcilable differences of two diametrically opposed points of view. Innocent or guilty, from one perspective she is a murderer and from the other, a heroic volunteer.
In order to negate the notion of a single authoritative truth, Doherty uses text and voiceover to set up contradictory positions that reveal how language shapes our perception of images. In Border Incident, (1994) and Unapproved Road II (1995), he engages with romantic ideas of the Irish landscape only to negate them through titles that trigger a plethora of associations located within a discourse of territorial division that envelopes all contested landscapes, past and present.
Recently, Doherty has deviated from a purely Northern Irish context in both the Berlin series, Extracts from a File, (2000) and Re-Run (2002) which while filmed in Derry, is resonant with references to events in Manhattan last September. By considering these departures next to earlier work, False Memory convincingly demonstrates that Doherty’s strength lies in his ability to make work, conceived in a particular time and place, comprehensible and poignant beyond the limits of that immediate context.
While it may be too optimistic to interpret False Memory as a sign that we are at last capable of mature self-reflection on thirty years’ of conflict, political sensitivity is a possible reason why an Irish artist with numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and North America, has had to wait until now for a major exhibition at home.
Of course, we could blame that phenomenon, variously interpreted as a symptom of the post-colonial condition or simply begrudgery, that has historically forced Irish artists to seek recognition abroad, and yet Doherty is one of the few who managed to resist exile. In truth, he has long benefited from the support of the more enlightened figures in Ireland, not least his fellow Derry man and founding director of IMMA, Declan McGonagle.
So perhaps up until now, we just weren’t quite ready to have Doherty interrogate our gaze, question our memories and expose our prejudices on this scale. The question remains; are we ready yet? It’s worth the trip to IMMA this autumn to find out.

Riann Coulter studied art history and English at TCD and was awarded an MA in 20th-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has been the Fellow in Outsider Art at IMMA since 2000 and has lectured at TCD and the American College, Dublin. She is presently studying for a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art.