New terrains: ‘Northern Irish art’ in the wider world

Chapter two asks how ‘Northern Irish art’ of the post-Troubles era might be critically approached and appraised in light of broader contemporary conditions. The relation of shifts in Northern Ireland’s art to wider developments in the global art world are addressed and the chapter discusses the ways in which artists from Northern Ireland have been positioned and presented internationally in the post-Troubles years. This chapter takes the 2005 exhibition of art from Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale as the departure point for an extended examination of how the representation of ‘local’ concerns is shaped in relation to wider cultural and economic forces.

Phantom publics: imagining ways of ‘being together’

Chapter 5 focuses on case studies of wide-ranging art projects — by Susan Philipsz, the Bbeyond collective, Phil Collins, Brian O’Doherty, Philip Napier and Mike Hogg and artist-group Factotum — that, in variously performative and relational modes, have involved staging, proposing or entering provisional situations of social encounter and collectivity. These events and interventions, it will be suggested, exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity to the challenges of the uneasy post-Troubles predicament. But in notable instances we find artists striving to make space for unorthodox perspectives and unheard voices, asking what it might mean to be part of a ‘public’ in post-Troubles Northern Ireland, and attempting to making visible — often in understated, ambiguous or anxious ways — what might otherwise remain hidden.

That which was: histories, documents, archives

Chapter four begins by further discussing the haunted spaces of Doherty’s practice as the starting point for a reflection on artists’ approaches to time and history. This part of the book highlights artists who have adapted conventional forms of documenting and archiving in order to speculate on alternative temporalities and histories of Troubles and post-Troubles life. In addition to analyses of artworks by artists such as Duncan Campbell (winner of the 2014 Turner Prize) and Miriam de Búrca, who both adapt documentary processes in an art context, attention is paid to art that studies the history of Belfast through psychogeographic urban wandering and to some curatorial attempts to historicise Northern Ireland’s art.

The post-Troubles art of Willie Doherty

Chapter three addresses work made in the post-Troubles era by the filmmaker and photographer Willie Doherty, one of the most acclaimed artists from Northern Ireland over the last three decades. Several significant works by Willie Doherty are singled out for close-reading: atmospheric photographic series and film narratives that are uncanny in their oblique, unnerving evocations of the landscapes of Belfast and Derry. This extended reflection on Doherty’s work considers in detail the strategic indeterminacy of his photographic art and addresses the shift in key film works made during the post-Troubles years towards explicitly ‘spectral’ themes.

Conclusion – or against conclusions

In his short, fragmentary text ‘Some notes on problems and possibilities’, Willie Doherty writes of ‘the impossibility of the task/to find a trace of some essential matter/to make an image’. What results, he suggests, is ‘barely emerging // an inadequate response’.1 In addressing the art of Northern Ireland’s post-Troubles period in this book, it has been essential to acknowledge something of this impossibility and inadequacy. It has been vital to stress how the perspectives of Doherty and others are insistently partial and provisional, open to question, resistant to closure. These are surely appropriate characteristics to re-emphasise as an attempt is made to bring this discussion to a close – a discussion which, however detailed in parts, could only ever be ‘barely emerging’ in relation to the complexities of this time and place....

Same difference: post-Troubles contexts and contradictions

Chapter one concentrates on the social and political developments pertinent to a study of post-Troubles art — asking what it means to talk in ‘post’ Troubles terms at all — and examines relevant contemporary art examples that offer distinctive, ambivalent perspectives on post-Troubles realities. Fundamental background details on the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement are combined with questions regarding the political and theoretical framing of this process of negotiation — keeping in mind the broader international contexts of a notional ‘post-Troubles’ situation. This widening of the frame (acknowledged globalisation as a factor in the peace process) is also vital in developing an adequate account of the art of this era, but diverse local outcomes of the Agreement are nonetheless acknowledged: from ongoing political problems caused by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the Agreement itself, to material manifestations of ‘peace’ in architecture and the wider built environment of Belfast.

Introduction

I returned many times to the same site until another fence was erected and a new building was put in place of the empty, silent reminder. I wondered about what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there. Had it absorbed or filtered into the ground, or was it possible for others to sense it as I did?...