Willie Doherty studied Fine Arts at Ulster Polytechnic (Belfast) between 1978 and 1981. He mainly works with photography, video and installation.

Doherty was one of a number of British artists in the mid-1980s who questioned the documentary use of photography. His work is closely caught up with the geopolitical territory to which he belongs, specifically Derry, on the troubled border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. His life in the city was marked by religious and national conflicts, from his birthname — he has two, one in Gaelic and the other in English — to the districts divided between pro-Irish Catholics on one side and pro-British Protestants on the other. From 1969 to 1972, after rioting, one area of the city proclaimed its independence from the British Government, a period that only came to an end after ‘Bloody Sunday’. This special context of daily violence and conflict is present throughout his socially and politically engaged oeuvre.

Indeed, his background has been a constant reference point in his work, from his early black-and-white photographs with overlaid text in the 1980s. Doherty draws a distinction between recoding and representing the landscape, opting for the former. He argues that the visible should not always be interpreted literally, thus distancing himself from the clichéd templates of so-called political art. Many of his pieces refer to natural landscapes with an immediate interpretation that might lead one to think of the work of Hamish Fulton or Richard Long (from both of whom he drew inspiration); however, his photos, created in a context in which what needs to be said is obscured, show that there is a story behind them. In 2010, he had his first photo shoot outside Ireland, precisely in Spain, for Manifesta 8 in Murcia, which picked apart the hidden world that exists in the centre of the city, under the bridges crossing the River Segura.

Doherty has staged solo shows at the Tate Gallery of Liverpool (United Kingdom, 1998); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, 2002, 2012); the Kunstverein (Hamburg, Germany, 2007); the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto, Canada, 2009); the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, United States, 2011); the Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen, 2012); and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2015-2016), among other museums. Retrospectives have also been held at the National Museum of Colombia (Bogotá, 2013) and Derry Museum (Northern Ireland, 2014). In 2007, he represented Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale; he has also taken part in exhibitions, including the Istanbul Biennial (2003); the São Paulo Biennial (2004); and Documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany, 2012). Doherty has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize (1994, 2003).

Isabel Tejeda