Gallery Facade. The Amnesiac exhibition.
Exhibition View.
Exhibition View.
Exhibition View.
Exhibition View.
Exhibition View
Exhibition View.
Damage. 2014. 70 x 46,5 cm. / C-Type color photograph.
Damage. 2014. 70 x 46,5 cm. / C-Type color photograph.
Damage. 2014. 70 x 46,5 cm. / C-Type color photograph.
El Amnésico / The Amnesiac. 2014. HD Video installation; Color, 5:1, Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
El Amnésico / The Amnesiac. 2014. HD Video installation; Color, 5:1, Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
El Amnésico / The Amnesiac. 2014. HD Video installation; Color, 5:1, Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
El Amnésico / The Amnesiac. 2014. HD Video installation; Color, 5:1, Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
Information
‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’
James Joyce, Ulysses (1918)
El Amnésico (The Amnesiac), 2014 is a new video work by Willie Doherty that
expands upon his preoccupation with the landscape as a repository of memory
and unresolved trauma. Recent works such as Secretion, 2012 and Remains,
2013 have explored how stories relating to the recent past might be excavated
from the topography of specific places in Kassel, Germany or Derry, Northern
Ireland. It is as if, for Doherty, some residual material from the past remains
embedded with the very landscape itself.
While Doherty adopts a more narrative form in El Amnésico (The Amnesiac),
there are also echoes of early works, such as Re-Run, 2002, Non-Specific
Threat, 2004 and Passage, 2006, where he used the device of the repeated
loop to suggest that the protagonist is caught or trapped within an endless cycle
of repetition.
El Amnésico (The Amnesiac) begins and ends with a car journey where we see
an unnamed man driving through a wooded landscape. What unfolds in
between could be viewed as his return to a particular place, somewhere half
remembered or half forgotten, or a momentary lapse in concentration from the
tedium of driving, a daydream or rupture in the fabric of the everyday.
In a context of moral ambiguity, where one is asked to willfully forget the events
of the past in order to construct the future, Doherty’s amnesiac exists in the
unguarded moments when a casual word or a familiar smell transports one
back to the very thing that one can never forget, the image that cannot be
erased.
El Amnésico (The Amnesiac) is accompanied by a group of 10 photographs
that Doherty made in the locations where the video was shot. Entitled Daño
(Damage), 2014, the photographs are of trees that have been subjected to
deliberate acts of vandalism and outbursts of violence. The traces and marks of
the past, the detritus of some unknown activity shape the ecology of an
unfamiliar terrain. The limits of what is visible begin to break down.
‘To reflect upon the ethics of memory is, at first sight, a puzzling task. This is so
because memory is not is the first instance an action, but a kind of knowledge
like
perception, or imagination and understanding. Memory constitutes a knowledge
of past
events or of the pastness of past events.’
Paul Ricoeur ‘Memory and Forgetting’ in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (ed.),
Questioning Ethics:
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 1999,
p.5.