Press release

Willie Doherty
«Same Old Story»
February 22 - May 10, 1998
PROJECT ROOM
Curated by Alessandra Galasso

Willie Doherty was born in 1959 in Derry (N. Ireland) where he lives and works. Since 1990, he has created video and slide installations: "Tell Me What You Want" (1996), "The Wrong Place" (1996), "Factory" (1995), "No Smoke without Fire" (1994), "At the End of the Day" (1994), "The Only Good One is a Dead One" (1993), "They're All the Same" (1991), "Same Difference" (1990). Willie Doherty participated in several international group exhibitions. He had one-person exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstverein München, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996, the British School at Rome in 1994, and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw.Since the late 1980s Doherty’s work has been concerned with the way events in Northern Ireland are covered in the media creating stereotypes and clichés overtly against the basic principles of democracy and freedom of information.
Unlike the media, however, Doherty does not take sides in his work, neither is he interested in using images as metaphors or empty rhetoric. He is an artist, not a photojournalist or a reporter and his work carries no hidden ideology.

Living and working in Derry, his decision to remain in Northern Ireland is as much a political decision as an artistic one. Politically it allows him to speak about issues which are local and specific, but which carry a universal resonance.

At the MAGASIN Willie Doherty presents his last work "Same Old Story", a video installation in which two sequences, combining shots of Derry, are projected onto large free-standing screens set opposite each other. It is impossible to see both screens from a single perspective.
Shots alternate from camcorder to steadicam, Hi-8 and surveillance footage. By combining the use of the moving image with long static shots and constantly changing the speed of the action, the artist creates a non-sequential narrative that the viewer is left to recombine.