Willie Doherty was invited to represent Britain at the 25th Bienal de São Paulo.
For his first showing in Latin America, Doherty presented a new double screen video installation entitled Re-Run, filmed in his native Derry in the north of Ireland.  

Born in 1959, Doherty first came to prominence in the late 1980s with a series of powerful photographic works with text which, like all his subsequent work, addressed the complexities of living in a divided community.  Over the last decade and a half Doherty has exhibited throughout the world in solo and group exhibitions, including a comprehensive solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 1998.  He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1994, awarded the Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 1995, and selected for the DAAD International Artists Programme, Berlin 1999-2000.

Re-Run consists of two video sequences filmed at night depicting a man running at full speed across the Craigavon Bridge which spans the River Foyle and connects/separates the Catholic west side of Derry from the Protestant east side.  The new work revisits the site of a photographic diptych of 1992, The Bridge, but whereas the earlier work was devoid of human presence, apart from the distant headlights of an oncoming car, Re-Run concentrates very much on the central figure of the running man. Shown on two large suspended screens within a confined darkened space, the man is seen both running away from the camera and directly towards it, seemingly caught in an endless loop as the two synchronised sequences are continuously repeated.  

Visual Arts published a bi-lingual leaflet to accompany Re-Run, containing full colour reproductions of both the new work and earlier work in context, and a newly commissioned text by Charles Merewether. The Henry Moore Foundation and Mabey & Johnson Ltd have generously supported the production of Re-Run.

In addition to the national representations, the Bienal is mounted an international exhibition entitled Iconografias Metropolitanas.  Featuring work by five artists from each of eleven major cities (Beijing, Berlin, Caracas, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Moscow, New York, São Paulo, Sydney and Tokyo), the artists invited to show in the London section are Glenn Brown, Michael Landy, Keith Tyson, Gillian Wearing  and Richard Wentworth. 

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Diptych

    A work of art comprising two separate sections, which are intended to be seen together. The panels are usually hinged together so that they can be closed like a book. This format was originally devised for portable altarpieces depicting scenes from the Christian Bible.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.