I awaited Willie Doherty’s solo show at Galerie Peter Kilchmann in March with a degree of nervousness, knowing that he was to reveal new work made in Zurich. Doherty’s impressive back catalogue is so informed by, and so intimately related to the place and people of Northern Ireland, that I had found his last departure from this specificity – the work at Documenta in 2012 – less successful. I was right to be nervous, but not for those reasons: Doherty’s film Without Trace is an unflinching portrait of this city’s peripheral zones. The narrative about a missing migrant worker speaks of snow and what it hides till spring, while hiding in plain sight are the tasteful but barren new constructions colonising marginal spaces.
The artist's exhibition, ‘A Portrait, a Story, and an Ending’ at the Kunsthalle Zürich, is the first in a series to test the institution’s library space
