Willie Doherty: Extracts from a File

Berlin by night: a dark, mysterious, and strangely beautiful place depicted by artist Willie Doherty in a remarkable series of black-and-white photographs made during his recent year-long residency in the city. In Doherty's nocturnal Berlin there are no recognizable landmarks, no bright city lights or streets bustling with people. What he offers instead are tantalizing and intriguing glimpses of light and traces of life in an otherwise pitch-black void. Our attention is drawn to dimly illuminated exteriors and the promise of interior spaces from which we are excluded; the glow of a chandelier through partially opened blinds, a gleam reflected in a puddle, shadows cast in empty streets. Doherty's photographs exist in a world between light and dark where images are transformed by our inability to locate them precisely. Extracts from a File represents a Berlin which perhaps never really existed. At once cinematic and atmospheric, these photographs also extend Doherty's concerns with surveillance and documentation and find echoes in the artist's earlier work about the conflict in his native Northern Ireland.