Northern Ireland Artist Uses Movies, Photos to Explore "The Troubles"

According to the Associated Press, an artist from Northern Ireland is premiering his first known work in as many years in a U.S. museum, a meditation inspired by The Troubles--over ten years to the day since the accords were signed by the governments in Britain and Northern Ireland and observed by most political parties in the disputed province.

"Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance" is set to premiere Sunday at the Dallas Museum of Art. Over 11 photos and one fifteen minute film are included in the exhibit.

In "Ghost Story" Belfast actor Stephen Rea narrates a collage of images, many of them of British troops shooting into fleeing crowds, deserted roads and a figure lying in a dark city underpass.

In the piece, Rea portrays a man attempting to grapple with his own memories of The Troubles, a 30-year period of violence in which over 3,400 civilians and 526 militants on the Irish republican and Ulster unionist side lost their lives.

Charles Wylie, who curated the exhibit, says the film's haunting images give weight to the feelings of unease many in Northern Ireland--both Catholic and Protestant--felt as they struggled to go about their daily lives during the violence.

"It plays with the notion of having a sense around you that things are around you that can't actually be seen," he said. "It isn't clear if the narrator is telling a story or is perhaps sharing the view of a million people."

The same eerie milieu can be seen in the photographs--many of them devoid of animals or people. In a 1994 photograph Doherty took, entitled "The Outskirts," the sun sets on a country road lined with reeds and tire tracks, suggesting rebel activity.

Pairing up with Doherty, Wylie decided to showcase the film and photos as a complete exhibit, hoping to spotlight the changes that have occurred since the Good Friday Agreement and its successors took hold.

"I was interested in how I could make a piece of work on the impossibilities of forgetting the past," Doherty said. "As a people, we [the citizens of Northern Ireland] have been asked to forget and move on. It's not easy to turn something on and off like a tap."

It's no accident that Doherty has found his muse in the subject of The Troubles. One of the 50-year-old artist's earliest memories is of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972--in which over 14 civil rights marchers, several of them teenagers, where fatally shot by British paratroopers in the Bogside area of Derry, Doherty's hometown.

The attack, which later sparked riots between police and residents, was the first incident during The Troubles in which unarmed civilians were gunned down by uniformed officers in full view of citizens and the press.

A commission chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate is expected to release its findings on the massacre later this year.

Even the town name of Derry is controversial. Though Irish Catholics refer to it by that moniker, Protestants prefer the full name, Londonderry--a reference to its status as a colony for Anglo settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The exhibit runs through Aug 30, when it will travel to the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame where it will stay until 2010.