Exhibit Recalls Horror of ‘Bloody Sunday’

Los Angeles seems far from troubled Northern Ireland, where residents this weekend weathered the high point of the volatile “marching season”--marking the Protestant victory in 1690 over Catholics in the Battle of the Boyne.

But a provocative show now on display at a Santa Monica gallery commemorates one of the strife-filled region’s blackest days: Jan. 30, 1972, “Bloody Sunday,” when British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights protesters in Derry, killing 13. Demonstrators called the action unprovoked; the British have maintained that the troops fired in self-defense when attacked.

It was a watershed event, one now embedded in the region’s psyche. So-called nationalist residents--those opposed to British rule--call it a massacre. But a government tribunal concluded that the troops acted in self-defense.

Among the items on display are likenesses and personal effects of the victims, from a scuffed pair of shoes to a 1970s record album to a set of rosary beads.

“I wanted to bring home the fact that these were ordinary men and boys: fathers, sons, brothers,” said curator Trish Ziff, an Englishwoman who now lives in Los Angeles but who spent four years in Derry. It was there that she established a photographic and film workshop in the heavily nationalist community.

The show grew out of a previous project by Ziff on Irish and Mexican artists. As part of that show, the gallery owner, Tom Patchett, traveled to Ireland with Ziff last spring. There the idea was born to do something about Ireland in his gallery.

The victims are elevated to iconic, larger-than-life status in portrait banners that provide a backdrop at the Track 16 Gallery and share wall space with several color photographs and digitially altered photo images depicting the region’s broader struggles. The black-and-white banners, created by Derry artists, were hoisted onto the city walls for 25th anniversary ceremonies in January.

The emotional evocation of Bloody Sunday has touched a chord with many here, despite the physical and emotional chasm between Southern California and Northern Ireland.

What gallery-goers see is less an art show than a pointed piece of social documentation, and one with an unabashed position: that the soldiers wrongly opened fire on a group of peaceful protesters. Borrowing a phrase from this side of the world, the exhibit is titled, “No Justice, No Peace”--in Gaelic, Nil Siochan gan Cheart.

That most viewers have been supportive is evident from the visitors book. “I feel for your country--the rain must consist of tears,” wrote one woman.

Added a 14-year-old girl: “Innocent people standing up for what they believe in should not die.”

But not everyone accepts the show’s political thrust. One man was particularly outraged by an image of British helicopter gunships patrolling over the green fields of southern Armagh County--”bandit country,” as it is known.

“This is very one-sided,” the visitor complained to Brigid Loughran, a Belfast native who has staffed the front desk. “I thought that was Vietnam.”

Responded Loughran: “We are England’s Vietnam.”

Angus Mackay, a spokesman for the British consulate in Santa Monica, said he hadn’t seen the show and declined to comment. “We take the position that films or art expositions or fiction books are not proper matters for governments to opine about,” said Mackay, who stressed his government’s efforts to defuse tensions during the incendiary marching season.

Accompanying the artifacts are intimate black-and-white likenesses from snapshots: Jack Duddy, 17 when he died, smiles impishly from behind his boxing gloves; William Nash, dead at 19, strums a guitar in his backyard; Gerard Donahy, dead at 17, as a big-eared boy in what looks like a first communion photo; Hugh Gilmore, also 17 when he was killed, seemingly clowning about in a dime-store photo booth.

The exhibition is appearing here as relatives of the victims are pushing for a new investigation, contending that the official inquiry was a whitewash.

“They say we Irish remember too much,” said Tony Doherty, who was 9 when his father, Patrick Doherty, was shot dead on Bloody Sunday. “But the British forget too much,” Doherty said in a telephone interview from Derry. His father’s scuffed boots, worn on the day he was killed, are on display.

Also on view is a sequence of black-and-white photographs by Gilles Peress, of the Magnum photo agency, showing Doherty’s father, crawling, desperately seeking to avoid being shot--and then succumbing after he was hit.

Such a powerful presentation, Doherty said, might be “too close for home” in his still-traumatized community. And it would probably be dismissed as propaganda in England, said Ziff, the curator.

The community’s hope, Doherty said, is that the show may help clarify world comprehension of the Northern Irish conflict, euphemistically called “the Troubles.” Too often, he said, the dispute is mischaracterized as an unreconcilable sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants.

“It’s essential that people identify the problem correctly,” Doherty said. “Only at that stage can people go about reaching a solution.”

“No Justice, No Peace” is part of the “Blood, Sweat and Tears” program at Track 16, 2525 Michigan Ave., through Aug. 16. Companion exhibitions include posters and photographs from the Spanish Civil War and political posters from Los Angeles.