Willie Doherty-Three Potential Endings
Coordinated by Gavin Murphy for Darklight Festival
Screens daily 8–10 October 2009, Smithfield Plaza
Darklight is delighted to present the Irish premiere of Willie Doherty’s new work Three Potential Endings as a site-specific screening in Smithfield Plaza.
The work presents a male figure besieged with the possibility of failure and uncertainty, and was conceived as a response to the shifting architectural landscape of contemporary Dublin. It does not provide any explanation or rationale but rather places the man in direct confrontation with the architectural spaces where he finds himself. The three sequences are simultaneously fragmented and connected by a fourth sequence that shows the man pacing around a small, confined space. It is unclear whether he is lost in thought and deep in concentration or whether he is confused and oblivious to his surroundings. Three Potential Endings extends the Willie Doherty’s concerns with exploring the dynamics of specific urban spaces through the medium of video.
Three Potential Endings was shot on location in Dublin during the summer of 2008.
About Willie Doherty
Born in Derry in 1959, Willie Doherty’s work has, since he began exhibiting in the early 1980’s, consistently addressed problems of representation, territoriality and surveillance, and the politics and rhetoric of identity, especially in his native Northern Ireland. Much of his early photographic work incorporated text and since the mid-90’s he has increasingly worked in film and video installation. Doherty has had solo exhibitions at venues across the globe, represented Ireland at the 1993 Venice Biennale and won the 1995 Irish Museum of Modern Art/Glen Dimplex Artists Award. He was also nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and 2003.
Public Interview and screening event
The artist will participate in a Public Interview and screening event, chaired by writer and critic Caoimhin Mac Giolla leith and introduced by Gavin Murphy, in Light House cinema on Saturday, October 10th at 3pm.